Five Nights at Freddy’s-inspired game

FNaC 3 is a free role-playing game inspired by the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise. This survival horror game serves as the third entry to the popular fan-made game, Five Nights at Candy’s. Here, you play as a young girl tasked with staying awake and alive from monsters that lurk across her room.

With a different major villain compared to its predecessors, FNaC 3 is a fitting end to the Mary Schmidt trilogy. It’s a faithful mobile port with good surprises, although it plays differently than the original FNAC Five Nights at Candy’s, looking more like a JRPG experience.

A different, yet scary experience

The first thing to note about FNaC 3 is that it literally ports the third entry. Five Nights at Candy’s was originally made for Windows systems, similar to the Freddy’s games. Next is that it has a different gameplay style to the other games. While FNaC 1 and 2 were 3D, first-person games, the third entry has pixel art RPG gameplay, similar to Five Nights at Freddy’s 4.

Monsters are led by Candy the Cat, the monstrous animatronic mascot for Candy’s Burgers & Fries and the competitor to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Parlor. The game is set in Mary’s room, with the main objective being to stay alive for five nights by keeping the monsters at bay. They can hide in the closet or under your bed, and it’s your task to check and point your flashlight at them.

As a faithful port without the conveniences of the original game, expect very long dialogues and cutscenes that can’t be sped up or skipped. This makes the game feel dragging, especially during the early parts of the game. Other than this issue, it is a legitimately scary game, with flashing lights and scary sounds. Even with its pixel art style, it remains unsettling and surprising.

A fitting end to a trilogy

What started as a fan-made project has become a full-blown trilogy of horror spinoffs, and FNaC 3 is a worthy cap to the adventures of Mary Schmidt. Taking gameplay ideas from Freddy’s 4, this game is a good example of a pixel-art survival horror experience. However, while it literally ports the game to mobile, it does so without consideration for the longer cutscenes and dialogues.