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| When you watch a lot of movies, play a lot of games, read a lot of books, you get a lot of... what-ifs.
“What if the B siblings weren’t there to help the slasher victims?” “What if the world was primarily inhabited by humans?” Just a lot of ways for filmmakers to give tension and limitations to their worldbuilding. I say this because Five Nights at Freddy’s also has this kind of limitation, where it’s like “there are no ghosts, but human souls possessing stuff.” The more you drown yourself in that material, you kind of forget you live in a world where natural spirits form and ancient aliens from a different planet frequently visit to cause trouble. You also forget that the people making this kind of art are living in this world as well. I say this because the development of Sister Location went crazy. Basically, egregorian creatures started manifesting around Scott Cawthon’s house around the development of FNAF World. Alongside the creatures looking like the FNaF characters, there was also this “Fake Scott” that started manifesting based around his depression when FNAF World got announced. Absolutely nobody knew about this at first, so “Fake Scott” replaced the Real Scott while he announced this new title; Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location. Fake Scott finished with the rough draft of the story, modeled the characters, and then the truth came out. I think Reddit Archives still has some posts documenting it, but Scott explained how he escaped Fake Scott’s realm and choked him to death right as he was starting to boot up Clickteam. This was INSANE to hear for a lot of people, especially with police investigation bringing the Fake Scott corpse in for dissection. All of his organs were found to have been scarred with burnmarks. Hours after the autopsy, the Fake Scott body turned into wood, which was even more confusing. Someone made a fangame based on that whole ordeal... Anyway, years after Sister Location came out, Real Scott released some screenshots of this text document that Fake Scott wrote. It had notes like hired voice acting, the dark comedy jokes taking a front seat, the whole game being spent in this underground bunker facility, and some outdated 2011 SkyDoesLovecraft butter joke with “THIS WILL BE A MEME” in full caps. Mind you, the game was planned on being released in 2016. With notes like that, I’d imagine anyone could obviously see through that Fake Scott ruse. Obviously the game is a lot more different on release. It wasn’t really a good idea for Scott to immediately go back into game development after being trapped in a hellish purgatory where he was forced to actually play FNaF to not be bisected by your creations before respawning, so you could see some slight psychosis of his in both the gameplay and story. A lot of FNaF is still being archived, but the character designs for the main Sister Location ones are publicly available. Those were designed by Fake Scott, and you can see that they’re more clearly meant to resemble pristine white robots with not much of an attempt to hide that illusion.  I’m not that big on the designs in all honesty. Baby’s fat, but not like Toy Freddy fat where it’s funny. Bon Bon being a hat is funny, but it sacrifices Funtime Freddy’s ears which I pretty much dislike. I don’t know why Real Scott decided to use the designs of Fake Scott when the latter kidnapped him into his personal hell. Must’ve been the psychosis. But, the gameplay. It builds off of FNaF4 of being this semi-free roam game, but this time you’re in Circus Baby’s Pizza World and you can head into a variety of rooms. Instead of reaching 6 AM, you have to complete the objectives that are inside the “Hub Room.”. Part of those objectives is to pass through those rooms, get the tools or do something in that room, then head back. Of course, all of these rooms inbetween are pitch black with animatronics inside. I think I like Ballora’s mechanic the most because, the moment you hear breathing from her you just have to “NOPE” and immediately head out. It’s really funny. But even if you hear no breathing, that just means you have to flash your light at Freddy or Foxy. It’s like a concentrated blast of light at Freddy, while Foxy jumps all over the place. With how big all of the rooms are, I don’t really like Foxy’s mechanic all that much... You get minor threats like the Minireenas who you just have to smack away before they suffocate you. The really annoying ones are the Bidybabs, and their upgraded Electrobab. Those idiots will just shut off the power of the Hub Room, allowing ANY ANIMATRONIC to enter to try and kill you. You have to tap them away in the Hub Room before they all gather, but they’re really small and are hidden pretty well. You have to head to the Generator Room to turn the power back on, but good luck having to go through 2 rooms of pure darkness where one room could have Ballora, then you head back and Ballora’s there again, then you go back AGAIN and Ballora’s there AGAIN, and you’re not allowed to head to the Generator Room if that happens because Ballora will then kill you. So you’re stuck in this leitmotif loop of Hub Room > Inbetween Room > Hub Room until Ballora stops showing up, which is VERY RARE in later nights. It’s pretty unfairly balanced. Most people hate Ballora because of that, which sucks because I like her design. She reminds me of one of my best friends. The story’s pretty neat as well. It follows up on the dead children of the FNaF2 location and explains how they’re now haunting the Funtimes (sans Baby but we’ll get to her) when William took the Toys apart to put their haunted metal inside the new Funtimes. We’re also getting focus on a new child of the Afton family: his daughter. I guess that whole Dream Theory fiasco got on Scott’s mind... Real Scott’s mind. By focusing on a completely different child, removing Golden Freddy, and no mention of the Crying Child, Scott probably wanted to emphasize that this whole thing’s not just focused on the Crying Child’s perspective. Plus, FNaF3 ended with the FNaF1 dead kids’ Happiest Day while forgetting about the FNaF2 kids, so... Funny. Oh and William’s daughter turns out to have been possessing Circus Baby the entire time and has been dead longer than the FNaF2 kids. The game tries to fool you she was one of the FNaF2 kids, but it’s until the 5th night where she makes a hostile takeover to try and get out of the restaurant she’s been trapped in. The game ends on a teaser for the next game. Springtrap’s still alive after the fire, Ennard couldn’t survive inside Michael, a new Freddy’s is going to open, and there’s some text of this mysterious guy who’s been there since the first death at Freddy’s talking about how “It’s time for me to end this.” It’s a pretty straight forward story and ending. Again, Scott was just out of torture limbo, so I don’t think he was all that mentally prepared to do all that symbolism and vague storytelling of the fourth game. 3.5/5 |
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