The latest installment of the uber-popular Five Nights at Freddy’s series may not identify its setting, but Pittsburgh-area players will immediately find it familiar.
Right off the bat, Five Nights at Freddy's: Into the Pit’s cutscenes, dialogue, and scenery make it clear that it takes place in a rundown area that’s a shell of an industrial past — when a mill powered the local economy. When I played, I couldn’t help but think of my hometown of Donora, a small borough in the Mon Valley.
However, Mega Cat Studios, the local developer behind Into the Pit, was evasive when Pittsburgh City Paper asked if the game was meant to take place in a real-life location.
“There’s fan theories about that,” says Madison Petrick, the game’s writer, before laughing and declining to confirm anything.
Since its Aug. 7 release, Into the Pit has pleased the Freddy’s fan base and impressed sometimes-skeptical reviewers with its pivot into a different gameplay style that features Mega Cat’s pixel graphics aesthetic. As of publication, the game has a 96% approval rating among Steam users (based on over 6,600 reviews) and a Metacritic score of 87. While Into the Pit is only available on PC, Mega Cat promises it will soon expand to Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and Xbox.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise launched 10 years ago and has since reached the upper echelon of indie game success, shared by fellow franchises such as Minecraft, with a concept that puts players in the role of an employee at a Chuck E. Cheese-like pizza shop haunted by murderous animatronics. The franchise includes several games, a feature film adaptation, toys, books, and more.
Into the Pit adapts a story from a Freddy’s book released in 2019. Mega Cat Studios, known for creating retro-style games that are released on physical game console cartridges, pitched an idea to Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon before that book even came out, according to James Deighan, the founder of Mega Cat. The pitch didn’t include a proposed story but a description of gameplay that would focus on a retro-style ethos. Cawthon liked the concept.
“Scott loved it for a long time. He believed in us pretty early, whenever nobody should have,” Deighan tells City Paper with a laugh. “He was our biggest fan throughout a lot of the development. I think he knows exactly what the fans want in that space. I think he can see the forest through the trees, even early, when we were polishing up incredibly rough edges, prototyping, exploring how to make it more fun.”
Deighan says the game began as something that could be played on old-school Super Nintendo consoles but eventually grew too large to fit on a cartridge.
The game follows Oswald, a young boy who hangs out at the rundown Jeff’s Pizza shop while his parents work. Oswald discovers a ball pit that takes him back in time to when Jeff’s Pizza and the town thrived. That’s when the animatronic monsters arrive and terrorize Oswald and his family.
Players control Oswald in third person and explore various locations in the town. Often, players will need to solve environmental puzzles and run and hide from monsters.
The studio counts the Clock Tower horror game series, which began in the mid-’90s, and the recent remake of the classic Resident Evil 2 among its biggest influences, with noticeable nods to modern horror games such as Amnesia.
In short, Into the Pit is scary. My wife and I took turns playing through the game together on our living room television in one sitting. I often screamed, and my wife often pawned off the controller to me when it became too intense for her.
I knew little about the game’s lore. My wife, on the other hand, has long watched YouTuber Markiplier’s gameplay videos of the series, which have garnered millions of views and introduced many of the series’ fanbase to Freddy’s. (The first-ever video he made about the game has 120 million views.) Petrick discovered the series in college through Markiplier, who still makes Freddy’s playthrough videos — in a five-part series, he even played through Into the Pit.
I most enjoyed the game’s gorgeous visuals — the style is reminiscent of 16-bit video games from the early- to mid-’90s but cranks the fidelity up to modern standards. Each character has charming and detailed animations for different actions, and the colors and lighting bring a sophisticated radiance and depth to the graphics.
“A lot of stuff that we looked at was actually horror movies and seeing what they did right,” says Andrew Marsh, the game’s cinematic director. “So a lot of stuff like Nightmare on Elm Street, Suspiria, and a lot of classic, just grimy horror movies … When you go [to the] past, it’s a lot of darker, cooler colors to really make you feel alone, but then when you’re in the present, a lot of warmer colors to make you feel safer to set up that sort of contrast.”
Mega Cat hopes to do another Freddy’s game, but team members are unwilling to reveal how it would look.
“We gotta keep people guessing. We can never make it predictable,” Deighan says. “It’s like, the opposite of Freddy’s fans.”