Software:Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted

Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted
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Developer(s)	Steel Wool Studios
Publisher(s)	ScottGames
Series	Five Nights at Freddy's
Engine	Unreal Engine 4
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift S
Release	May 28, 2019
Genre(s)	Survival horror
Mode(s)	Single-player

Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted (often shortened to Help Wanted, abbreviated to FNaF VR: HW, or simply FNaF VR, and also known as Five Nights at Freddy's 7) is a virtual reality survival horror video game developed by Steel Wool Studios and published by ScottGames. It is the seventh main installment of the Five Nights at Freddy's series. The game was released on May 28, 2019 for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets on Microsoft Windows, and PlayStation VR headset on PlayStation 4 and is slated for upcoming release on the Oculus Quest. A non-VR version of the game was released on December 17, 2019. Unlike its VR counterpart, it will be available on more gaming platforms outside of Windows and PlayStation 4 at a later date.

The game presents itself as "the Freddy Fazbear Virtual Experience", produced for the fictitious company Fazbear Entertainment to help improve its public image after a series of debilitating lawsuits. Gameplay focuses on a series of minigames based on previous games in the franchise, in which the player must evade attacks from sentient animatronics and perform dangerous maintenance tasks around a pizzeria. The game's canon establishes the previous games in the series as video games in-universe.

The game was positively received by critics and is among the top selling virtual reality games on Steam.

Gameplay

The game contains 50 playable minigames, which can be accessed from the game's hub. Many of these minigames recreate the mechanics of the previous games in the series, with their controls adapted to be better suited for a 3D virtual environment. The minigames are divided into groups by game of origin, and sorted by increasing difficulty (for example, minigame Night 1 of the FNAF 1 group is easier than Night 2, and so on.) In all minigames, losing results in a jump scare.

The original Five Nights at Freddy's inspires 5 minigames that recreate each of the game's five nights (levels). Situated in a security guard's office, the player must survive a full night shift by conserving power and avoiding attacks from four animatronics, which can be observed through security cameras. All visuals of the game are updated from 2D renders to 3D models, and all buttons and controls are laid out around the 3D office for the player to physically interact with. For example, the camera feed, which previously obscured the player's entire screen, is displayed on a monitor on the player's desk. Five Nights At Freddy's 2 and Five Nights At Freddy's 3 are adapted in a similar manner, with updated visuals and concrete UI.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 inspires two different types of minigames. The Night Terrors minigames adapt the gameplay of some of its main levels, in which the player must ward off animatronics from entering their bedroom by strategically opening and closing the doors. Some of these minigames allow the player to move by "teleporting" to different locations within view, a common VR locomotion method. The original game's "Fun with Plushtrap" minigame is adapted as one of the Dark Rooms minigames, in which the player must use a flashlight to locate small animatronics around an unlit area.

Five Nights at Freddy's, itself composed of several minigames, lends its mechanics to multiple types of minigames. The Parts & Service minigames require the player to perform maintenance on several animatronics by opening compartments and swapping parts around their bodies. Vent Repair takes place in a maintenance shaft, in which the player must solve puzzles by flipping levers and pressing buttons while repelling animatronics with a headlamp. One Night Terrors game and one Dark Rooms game are also adapted from Sister Location.

Winning each minigame in normal difficulty unlocks its counterpart in Blacklight Mode, an advanced difficulty mode which adds visual and/or auditory distractions to each game (e.g. balloons floating around the room, loud music playing, et cetera). Winning all minigames in both difficulty modes unlocks one final game, Pizza Party. Unlike the other games, Pizza Party is a maze which utilizes teleporting movement.

Collectible coins and cassette tapes are hidden throughout the various minigames. Collecting coins unlocks virtual toys that can be played with at the in-game Prize Counter, while collecting tapes unlocks audio logs that the player can listen to.

Plot

In recent years, the corporate entity Fazbear Entertainment came under fire for several incidents and disasters that allegedly occurred at their various pizza restaurants (the events of the previous games), which have been established as urban legends. The problem was made worse by several video games based on the legends, created by an unnamed indie developer. In an attempt to overturn the bad reputation these rumors gave the company, Fazbear Entertainment commissioned the "Freddy Fazbear Virtual Experience", a virtual reality game meant to make light of the rumors and convince players those events are completely fictitious. However, this narrative is contradicted by sixteen cassette tapes hidden throughout the game, which contain logs recorded by one of the game's fictitious developers.

Meant as a warning for future testers and developers, the tapes expose a lawsuit happening during the game's development, involving an incident with a past employee and a paper slicer, which threatened the game's completion. In addition, they reveal Fazbear Entertainment to have hired the indie developer to make the previous games (Jeremy, the protagonist of Five Nights at Freddy's 2), before cutting ties and smearing him; the games were part of an elaborate ploy to discredit the rumors surrounding the company.

Most importantly, the tapes warn of a segment of malicious code that was uploaded to the game from an old animatronic's circuit board. The code takes the form of an aberrant character that attempts to escape the game by possessing the player's avatar. The tapes task the player with killing the malicious entity by performing a hard restart during the possession process. Even if the player successfully does so, a cutscene implies the entity was not fully destroyed.

Downloadable content

Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted - Curse of Dreadbear is a Halloween-themed downloadable content pack for Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted. The DLC was released in three parts, with several "waves" of new minigames released on October 23, October 29, and October 31, 2019, for a total of 10. The DLC pack includes new animatronic characters, returning animatronics from previous games, and a Halloween-themed hub.

Some of the new stages are re-skinned versions of existent minigames, such as a version of the FNAF 1 minigames called Danger! Keep Out! Notable new game modes include a shooting gallery similar to Walt Disney World's Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, a free-roaming corn maze, and an assembly line in which the player must construct an animatronic.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted is a non-VR version of this game. The only two new additions are a loading screen and a teaser for a next game, that has so far only a code-name - Five Nights at Freddy's 9.

Development

On August 19, 2018, Five Nights at Freddy's creator Scott Cawthon confirmed on his Steam thread that he would be making a Five Nights at Freddy's virtual reality game in collaboration with an unspecified studio. On March 25, 2019, during Sony Interactive Entertainment's State of Play live stream, announcing several new games coming to the PlayStation 4, a trailer announcing the game was shown, and the developer was confirmed to be Steel Wool Studios. The game debuted publicly at PAX East from March 28 to March 31, 2019, and was available at subsequent PSVR demonstrations before its release.

Five Nights at Freddy's creator Scott Cawthon initially approached Steel Wool Studios with the idea of recreating the original Five Nights at Freddy's in virtual reality. He liked the studio's first proof-of-concept so much that he expanded his initial plan to cover all of the previous Five Nights games. Many aspects of Cawthon's character designs had to be updated to look convincing and remain scary in a 3D environment, including their movements and finer details.

Reception

Reception
Aggregate score Aggregator Score Metacritic 81/100 (PC)

The game was met with positive reviews from critics, holding a score of 81 out of 100 on Metacritic. Reviewers praised the game for its effective use of virtual reality and its success in introducing new mechanics while preserving the series' feel and atmosphere, while being accessible for players new to the series. However, the game's frequent use of jump scares could make it less scary and more obnoxious over time for some players.

The game is listed as one of PlayStation's "Favorite Horror Games of 2019" and is one of the top 30 best selling VR games on Steam.

The game was nominated for the Coney Island Dreamland Award for Best AR/VR Game at the New York Game Awards.