FNAF: Quality Breach

 Bugs always come back

So I'm a tiny bit of a fan of Five Nights at Freddy's franchise, to the degree where I think the original idea was solid, the community it holds captive can be fun and the totally twisted way that 'storytelling' is handled in the series (like Dark Souls but put together by someone who doesn't even know the full picture himself and is stringing along ideas as he goes) is entertaining to shift through. That's why I always have a positive slant towards this series and have kept up with the comings and goings of Security Breach with interest. When it first launched I had a very hopeful blog to write about it, commending the series for crossing the proverbial gap into mainstream appeal and putting out a game visually on par with other big name horror titles. I had just seen the bare basics, but I hoped the game would live up to it's promise and at least provide an experience that was suitably 'Five Nights'. So that's not asking for the scariest jumpscares in the world, but just a little bit of that iconic helpless creep factor. And the results? Umm... yeah the game is a tiny bit of a mess unfortunately, and I want to get into it.

First of all I should address the clear issue here; this was a game that really needed more time in the oven. Steel Wool Studios had some priors going into Security Breach, so it's not as though they're a group of amateurs attacking this project they didn't know how to make, more as if they maybe bit off a bigger concept then they could chew. Scott Cawthon bought the team some time by putting together his own little beat-em-up game whilst the main game was delayed, (I think it was delayed twice, unless my memory fails me.) but with this final game it's looking like they may have needed another whole year on top of that. The game is buggy, the grasp on the world space is loose, the story slips away from the tellers and only the canonical ending of the game is animated, the others feature unvoiced comic-book strips. (Maybe that was intentional in order to highlight the canonicity of the apparent 'true ending', but when combined with everything else it just makes the game look unfinished.) Spoilers will follow, by the by. So look out for that.

First there are the bugs, oh the bugs! This is the first time the FNAF series has given it's players a fully free-roam area to explore and that first-time-nervousness is all over this series' face. Pilot mech suit Freddy was glitching into restricted-to-the-player areas at launch and screwing with basic progression, the PS5 was dropping frames whenever not on performance mode, some old triggers left on the map totally broke narrative cohesion and sequencing, and there was a time where if you pressed the space-key whilst entering Glamrock Freddy, the entire world would unload in an instant and you'd have to hang around in a black void of nothingness whilst the game slowly put itself back together, loading in each asset one-by-one. And that isn't even touching on the crashes and freezing that has plagued this game all over the place. Whilst it's clear that the actual content of the game wasn't finished, it's becoming more and more apparent that the team couldn't even squeeze in the time to finish quality assurances satisfactorily. This project must have really come to the absolute wire for them.

Speaking of 'unfinished', the game really doesn't really feel like it's fits into the whole 'open world model' very well. Security Breach takes place in a Freddy themed mall with diners, stores, a young children's play area, a cinema and more attraction spots then you can shake a stick at. For a franchise that has always featured singular restaurants in past entries, this whole operation seemed on a whole other league, with a jump from depicting an operation featuring maybe a dozen employees to crafting one that must demand hundreds. But it's all just so barren. The actual design behind the world and it's rendering is stellar, and I adore seeing all the different locations and fantasising over how cool it would have been if all of these areas had a chance to actually factor into the gameplay loop, but we're in the current reality where that hasn't been the case and most of this game is just scene dressing. The game's narrative takes you on a couple of routes through the backrooms of the facility, and then offers a little freedom to explore the three key attractions, but there's so much unused space inbetween these sections! The cinema has nothing worthwhile attached to it, most of the diners are totally empty and there's an entire faux-mesa in which it doesn't feel like the enemy animatronics can even spawn in. So why is the area so darn large then?

The narrative, originally proposed to show the story of this new threat for the franchise, Vanny, absolutely drops it's star villain for the vast majority of the story. (And for the 'true' end) The community are joking now about how little she factors into the events of the game, and the fact that, if you get the true ending, she doesn't even show up for the finale. It seems like a big missing story link. In fact, there's a lot of the story that seems to feel like it goes nowhere and achieves little, beyond introducing a couple of new characters to the lore. Don't get me started on how the true ending brings bloody Spring Trap back for the third time only to get burnt to death. Oh, you burned him? The guy who's catchphrase is "I always come back"?, and whom was slain through burning all those times before? Something tells me this time ain't going to be so permanent. So then, what exactly was progressed in the wider narrative by the events of the true ending? More of a story complaint there, but I think it stands.

And then there's the 'fear factor' of the franchise. Now Five Nights at Freddy's has never been a terrifying series, save for maybe it's very first entry when no one had any idea what was going on and sometimes you'd be faced with sudden fourth-wall-shattering events like a random golden animatronic that would show up and crash your game to desktop. This series' concept on fear was mostly just jumpscare scenes powered by the fear of the unknown. Security Breach seems to have delineated that even further to the point where even the jumpscares are easily foreseeable and lack serious impact, just by the simple design switch-up of turning the gameplay into a hide-and-seek affair. The only shock comes from that damn map-bot who feels the need to grab your head and shake you whenever he gets a hold of you. The only scary thing from this entire experience are those robots, the actually cool Music man showdown scene, those Weeping Angel exoskeletons in the basement and the sheer terror of trying to do the finale of the game without any save points. Speaking of-

What kind of crazy, nonsense idea was it to have the finales of the game locked behind extended challenges without the checkpoint system? Since when did this series turn into an Ironman challenge? The last thing anyone wants is to spend thirty minutes backtracking this way and that because they stumbled into a jumpscare spot by accident (and sometimes with little warning); unless you've specifically signed up for it beforehand, no one is inherently on board with wasted playtime. It almost seems as though the team were aware of this staggeringly abrupt design shift and how annoying it was, too, because there is still a bug to totally reset the saving after the endgame has been activated, and it's super easy to perform. Almost as though it was spotted and left in as a backdoor way to make the final moments of the game not so tedious. I understand the idea that 'consequence equals tension', but there are points to which consequence bleeds into more frustration than fun too; a little balance would have been welcome.

And thus are the most glaring issues with FNAF Security Breach, despite being a very pretty and ambitious title for this franchise, it's lack of polish has given away to rust far too easily and often for anyone to easily coat over with hand waving. A few problems here or there would be forgivable, but this many and dripping from every corner, and the game becomes hard to recommend in it's current state. Steel Wool aren't giving up, they want to keep patching the game up, but some of the problems here are fundamental, and even version of this title that plays without a single bug is still going to suffer from an overwhelming feeling of "This world is far bigger than it needs to be", "Why do these certain bits of the design lead nowhere?", "What's the point of collectibles?" and "These mechanics don't feel like they're implemented right." Still, if this is the sort of scale that FNAF wants to build off in the future, then maybe the next game is going to be something very special indeed. (Provided, you know; it actually gets the chance to be finished.)