One of the most critically acclaimed indie horror games ever made, Five Nights at Freddy’s, currently purchasable on Steam for $5, is getting a sequel, barely a month since its release last August.
We know this because a teaser image featuring the game’s titular antagonist and the words “2- Grand Reopening 2015” was uploaded on sole developer Scott Cawthon’s website. There really isn’t any other way to interpret that other than as an announcement of a sequel set for release next year.
This is, of course, a good thing, as Five Nights is generally regarded as one of the most terrifying horror games to come out, period, and with a presumably larger budget owing to its predecessor’s success, Five Nights 2 is sure to expand greatly on the original’s simplistic though effective gameplay.
Five Nights at Freddy’s casts players as a hapless night watchman at a pizza chain restaurant that could only have been designed by Satan. Because the restaurant caters to children, much like Chuck E. Cheese, it features animatronic robots of what are supposed to be cute and cuddly animals. The problem is that at night, the robots are free to wander the restaurant in order to prevent their servos from locking up (yeah, right), and have a tendency to horrifically murder anyone on the premises, in this case, you the player.
As the night watchman, you are confined to a security office, where you must constantly monitor the store’s security cameras to keep track of the robots. As soon as you get the sense that they are making their way to your office to kill you, you must shut either one (or both) of the two doors to keep them out. The problem is that you happen to be working in the most shoddily designed security office ever made, and using the security cameras or keeping the doors shut for too long drains the room’s power supply, and once that runs out, all you can do is sit in near-darkness and wait for your mechanized murderers to come and dismember you.
You must keep up this precarious balancing act between preserving power and using the room’s assets for the duration of your shift, which, in real-world time, lasts nine or so minutes. As the title implies, there are five of these shifts to get through, though a sixth one is unlocked should this difficult task be achieved. The below gameplay video from Markiplier is a good alternative for those unwilling to take on the worst part time job ever.
Five Nights was conceived by Cawthon when a previous game he put out, a family friendly game featuring a beaver, was critically savaged. “People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal,” he said in an interview to IGM, “I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself- I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that.”
More news on Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel is sure to follow in the coming weeks.