[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Es genial

Before you even officially start playing, the striking blood-red menu screen accompanied by a haunting score and artwork reminiscent of a particularly grim adult horror movie expertly establishes the bleaker tone you can expect from this fourth entry in the long-running Five Nights at Freddy's series. Stepping away from the pizzerias of the past, you're thrust into a child's creepy bedroom in the middle of the night to ward off the nightmarish manifestations of his fears. All while an increased emphasis on storytelling delivers a dark tale with a shocking ending that provides horrific new context for the entire scenario. These stylistic and thematic changes create what is easily the most inspired title in the franchise since the original thus far, but they aren't the only areas where improvements have been made. For the first time in FNaF's history brief pop-up tutorials are present to explain the mechanics to you. A great thing as the established gameplay formula has undergone a few fairly significant changes in this outing. Audio cues have always been a big part of these experiences, but here you must rely almost exclusively on them to survive. Without any cameras to keep an eye on you'll be listening for the sounds of things like breathing or footsteps to decipher where your animatronic pursuers are, running back and forth to close doors on either side of the room should one get too close in-between checking on the foes you can see hiding in the closet or on the bed behind you. Minus the lessened visual component, it's a setup that vaguely hearkens back to the triumphant hit that started it all and is genuinely pretty fun. There are issues that keep it from reaching the same heights though. For a game so centered around sussing out valuable information with your ears, you'd think they would have put a larger emphasis on ensuring there was a greater sense of aural clarity. An option window did appear that told me to turn up my volume until I could hear the chirping crickets it had playing, but even with it on max I couldn't make out a single, solitary noise until I craned my head right next to the speaker on my Switch Lite. A good pair of headphones naturally fixes this dilemma, however you run into another problem in that when you inevitably make a mistake and trigger one of those infamous jump scares you could very well burst an eardrum given how loud the shrieking that accompanies them is. Then there are the various fake outs such as the occasional inexplicably delayed reactions the enemies will sometimes have that can make you believe you're safe when you in fact actually aren't to think about, yet considering this seems to be a little bit of misdirection-based trickery more than anything I guess I can somewhat let it slide. Scott Cawthon's willingness to take the brand in an unexpectedly harsh, tragic direction rather reinvigorates it after the prior pair of lackluster installments. The really, really unsettling vibe brought about by that decision brings back the tension and fear in a unique way with only a fraction of the frustration found in its two most direct predecessors. So while it may have taken a couple of attempts and there are still some irritating design choices, the third time was definitely the charm as Five Nights at Freddy's finally has a recommendable sequel.