Five Nights at Freddy's offers a unique take on horror. Its approach to the survival horror gaming genre largely manages to achieve its results by taking agency out of the player's hands. As the security guard monitoring a children's pizza parlor at night, the only aspect of the game you have control over is the monitoring of the security screens and the automated lights and doors. Each night, colorful cartoon automatons prowl the parlor's halls, and it's your job to survive until daybreak. You accomplish this by keeping a close eye on the screen and using the auto locking function of the doors to prevent the automatons from reaching you.

The game does a phenomenal job of maintaining tension. You can't watch everything at once, and multiple monsters roam through the halls. At night, the normally colorful pizza parlor takes on a ghastly form, and while it relies largely on jump scares, the quality visual design and sound engineering does a lot of heavy lifting in evoking a horrifying environment. Further ramping up the tension is the limitations of the power generators. You only have so much juice on any given night, so resource management becomes a critical component of your continued success.