The Five Nights at Freddy's has a rich and acclaimed history of being one of the most defining indie horror games of all time. Each new installment adds more mysteries to the franchise that fans adamantly analyze. Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach delivers an intense experience as you attempt to evade killer animatronics while uncovering the many mysterious inside Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex. Despite the amazing art direction, the title suffers from a multitude of technical issues and artificial difficulty problems. Despite Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach's appealing visual design and interesting mystery, the many shortcomings cannot be forgiven.
 

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach stars a child named Gregory. After being trapped inside Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzlaplex, he must team up with Freddy, an animatronic seeking only to aid the young boy in escaping the facility. Quickly, you learn that the other animatronics are not operating as intended, instead of seeking to capture Gregory for some insidious means as you venture through the massive building teeming with more mysteries to uncover—especially something with the security guard Vanessa.

The narrative is vague but plentiful, with secrets to uncover. Many of these require you to take risks as they're tied to collectibles. The game makes this harder by not saving any progression unless you save the game, meaning any collectibles you gather are not counted unless you save the game. The worst is that there's a glitch that doesn't count your collectibles even if saved.

That's not the only many glitch in the game; there are many. Another serious one is linked to one of the game's many endings. You have to play a series of arcade games in order, but the developers forgot to program the controls on the PS5 versions, making them unplayable. This coupled with frequent crashes and the various animatronics glitching out and this game makes the original release of Fallout 76 look stable.
 

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach is largely a sneaking game but your options are limited. You can crouch, run crouch, and run normally with a stamina meter linked to how long you can run. You can also hide in specific areas to evade capture, distract using specific objects that cause sound, or use items granted through progression to disable the robots temporarily. There's no leaning, sticking to walls, or peeking out of hiding spots, and this is to encourage the use of the camera system. You can spot enemies using this system to better find a path but often just running is the best option. This is because the game artificially increases by overwhelming the player with minor segway guards and robotic janitors.

With the main cast of animatronics limited to Roxy the Wolf, Chica, and Monty the Gator, the developers decided to add segway guards that patrol and call the animatronics when spotting Gregory. This is a good idea but its execution is poor due to the massive amount of these guards. There are so many that the models will often clip into 1 another. They cannot spot you unless you step into their flashlight but after a short annoying jump scare plays and the animatronic teleport to your location. You heard me right; instead of having the animatronic run to your location it just teleports. It's ridiculous. Couldn't the developers program the animatronics to run to your location often? The animatronics will just appear in areas because the game calls for them without any reason of how they got there.
 

The animatronics are very well-designed and have distinct personalities. Roxy is shown to have low self-esteem, Chica is obsessed with food, and Monty acts as the cool one. Freddy is the protector of Gregory but still sees the others as his friends and offers safety by providing an option to climb into his chest. This makes it impossible for the others to see you with the exception of the Daycare attendant. This animatronic appears during certain times and can only be avoided using a charge station, a booth used to charge Freddy's batteries as he's a limited use and if drained will attack Gregory. You can call Freddy at almost any time, the exception being when Freddy is unavailable or you don't have a map of the area, but Freddy getting caught in the environment is a common issue.

The animatronics have an insanely precise vision, able to see Gregory but any distance if they're looking in his direction. This coupled with the absurd amount of robotic guards and avoiding detection is vexing. Like other games in the franchise, you die instantly if caught and reset to the last save. To increase the difficulty often the game will remove the option to save and during critical moments where there's only 1 path punish the player for making a simple mistake. This game is not forgiving and often, you'll feel cheated.

Challenge is a difficult thing to find a balance, especially with one standard option, but Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach fails on this. Not counting the multitude of technical problems such as crashing and enemies shifting between alert and searching seconds apart the game punishes any mistakes. In fact, the game outright removes the option to save once you reach the end game. There is no reason for this; the game provides no explanation why you cannot save other than "Deal With It". Other games in the horror genre provide limited items used for saving and that would've been an ideal option. But removing the option to save, not track collectibles unless you save, and die with one hit if you make one mistake or if the game crashes is just foolishness.
 

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach can cause motion sickness due to the framerate. At times, the game's frame rate will drop causing stuttering which caused me to feel nauseous at times. It wasn't anything serious but how they greenlit a game that causes actually sickness is astonishing.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach does excel in the atmosphere and art direction. The Pizzaplex is amazingly decorated with a variety of areas to explore that are each distinctively designed. Unfortunately, navigation isn't great and the game doesn't give you a direction of what to do or where to go. This would be fine if they didn't place dozens of enemies in every area and make getting around so tedious. I was often floored by how amazing each area looked, but having to deal with the stress that one mistake could mean instant death made exploration a chore.
 

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach's appealing setting and sense of discovery encourage you to head out and explore. But once you start to actually play the game to many problems start to make the attractive parts vexing. Whether it's the overabundance of patrols, insane cone of vision from the main enemies, framerate stuttering, crashing, or saving problems. The game is not hard because of the challenging encounters but difficult because the developers added archaic systems. 1-hit deaths, no checkpoints, no collectible instant saving, and removing saves altogether after a certain point. Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach may look appealing but once you dive into this game you'll find it's present with glamorous wrapping but requires a chainsaw to open.

EDIT:

After replaying Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, we discovered that another glitch exists where the player is locked out of entering Freddy. Because of this, you cannot progress in the game since you're required to enter Freddy to evade Moondrop. If you enter Freddy through the charging station you cannot exit Freddy. After discovering this we have decided to reduce the score from 40 to 15. Since this is not a finished game and is broken on such a technical level, it should not be considered a finished product.
 

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed