Its starts “innocently” enough – the camera zooms into the animatronics’ severed heads trough their eyes, the messages, the ominous background sounds… but it descends into something more horrifying to fans that anything the animals themselves could do in such short time.
Just not the way you would expect.
Scott Cawthon, the creator of the incredibly successful horror series Five Nights at Freddy’s couldn’t choose a more appropriate time to release the teaser of his continuation to the saga, Five Night at Freddy’s World. It just isn’t the game his fans were waiting for.
This time, you won’t be tasked with staying up all night watching over (and surviving) Fazbear’s Pizza, but with assembling an RPG party of animatronics to combat the evil forces of regular, non-animal robots with the powers of pizza, cupcakes, happy tunes and ravaging fangs.
While unexpected, this should not be a surprise – back in September, through a Steam announcement, Cawthon declared he was working in a new game that would not continue the series main storyline (which is already over) and wouldn’t be an horror game, either.
Many fans accuse him of “jumping the shark” with World, but truth is, FNaF was the actual “jump” to start with. When Cawthon declares he wants to “use these characters in a new, funny way… a type of game that I hadn’t made in a long time”, he’s talking about games like Chipper and Sons Lumber Co. or The Desolate Hope among his other earlier, and very colorful, ventures into Steam Greenlit.
Indeed, if it wasn’t for Chipper and Sons Lumber Co. (a game about beavers collecting wood, which you can watch here, as it’s no longer featured in Cawthon’s YT Channel) there would be no FNaF – the game was heavily criticized in the animation department because its characters “moved like robots”, or “animatronics”, instead of living beings.
Rather than being discouraged (well, he was for a while) by the harsh comments, he took this aspect as an advantage to start the development of his now famous franchise.
An exemplary “jumping the shark” if ever there was one.
Back with the game, very little has been shown, but according to Cawthon, you will “create a party using the huge selection of characters from the FNaF games, including the classic, withered, toy, phantom, and nightmare versions”. He promises to release a demo as soon as he can, and says “this game’s scope is significantly larger than previous games in the series”, so it might take its time.
For now, you can expect Five Nights at Freddy’s World to launch somewhere in 2016 on Android, iOS and PC. Expect updates on Scott’s page and YT Channel.