‘Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach’ Review: An Exciting but Sloppy Haunted Hayride

The next-gen Five Nights game fans have been waiting for, but was this pizza pie served too soon?

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach is the 13^th entry of the Five Nights series and the second game released to home consoles behind Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted (which this game is a sequel to, sort of). Developed by Steel Wool Studios and published by ScottGames, the publishing domain of series creator Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach puts players into the role of Gregory, a nine-year-old boy trapped inside Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex after closing. As Gregory, the player must escape the Pizzaplex with what little resources they have, a task easier said than done, as the building employees aren’t so keen on seeing them leave.

Things that I really liked

The gameplay!

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach is a complete overhaul of its predecessors: it’s a revolutionary full swing in both scale and gameplay that is still a first-person survival horror experience but with a dynamic ‘free-roam’ aspect at the fount. While previous Five Nights games iron-bolted the player to a single fixed position, the player’s actions relegated to hitting door switches, closing off vents, or casting a flashlight on enemies to shoo them away, running and sneaking past danger occupies the space of Security Breach‘s ‘combat’. Thus, players should hydrate accordingly because there is a looooot of cardio in this one (believe me, you’ll burn some pounds off during your playthrough).

With the ‘free roam’ element added in the mix, the player is incentivized to search every nook and cranny of the building in hopes of finding an escape while enemies, the series’ iconic animatronics, stalk their every move. When stripped of its horror elements, Security Breach can feel and play like a first-person walking simulator with light platforming sprinkled in.

Early in the game, players are given, in a throwback to the original games, a ‘Fazwatch’ that can switch perspectives between cameras to watch enemies from above and acquire two stun weapons roughly halfway through their playthrough. Apart from these tools, the player is ordinarily defenseless in a similar fashion to the Outlast and Amnesia series, relying on their wits, their patience, and ultimately their grit to survive. Unlike those two series, however, getting grabbed once by an animatronic is an immediate ‘game over’ (or, as Five Nights fans fondly know as a series signature—a ‘jumpscare’). To make matters worse, Security Breach seldom autosaves for the player; they must save manually at save stations littered throughout the restaurant, an aspect I found refreshing in an age where modern games save progress for the player.

So, walking simulator or not, players always need to watch their step. When seen by an animatronic, a spooky ‘alert’ noise is heard, and the player must then run and hide until the heat is off. Because the player has limited stamina, stealthy approaches are absolutely prioritized in the presence of animatronics. This balance between chase and stealth is maintained throughout most of the game, with the exception of optional minigames. When players are not being chased, they have limited mechanical interactions with the environment, often amounting to “hold action button” (in my case, “hold square” on the PS4) to open doors, activate generators, or slink into hiding spots when animatronics are nearby.

While the cartoony style of Security Breach is consistent with previous entries, it’s been recontextualized for eighth-gen consoles, resulting in the game being much shinier, rounder, and more luminous than its predecessors. I will elaborate on the visual design overall later.

The Pizzaplex!

While the narrative objective of the game is to escape Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex alive, players deprive themselves of the full experience if they don’t explore the environment.

When creative director Jason Topolski said Security Breach is “the most ambitious Five Nights at Freddy’s game yet,” in a PlayStation blog post last February, he wasn’t mincing words: in every glossy, pizza-greased corner of the restaurant, one can see the love Steel Wool Studios has for the series. From Roxy Raceway go-karting to Fazer Blast laser tag, Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex is enormous, a monstrous, three-story pizzeria palace with two giant arcades, a ‘fun’ exercise studio, countless merchandise kiosks, a bowling alley, and much more.

I couldn’t help but smile seeing the best of my childhood years in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant reflected inside a horror game. Even with certain game objectives in mind, how could I resist wandering off to explore this ridiculous place? Disarrayed party posters, arcade machines, colorful cardboard cutouts, untouched slices of cake, gold Freddy statues (not golden, big difference…), plush toys?! I took my time to feed on the sights of what would be the greatest birthday party ever for every child. Glitzy and overflowing with 1980s neon nostalgia, the Pizzaplex’s design is as garish as it is hypnotizing and convinces the player it can be a real, living place.

The presentation is so outlandish that even the blurred texturing of objects on the PlayStation 4 was a non-issue during my playthrough. I would’ve liked seeing the TV screens with Freddy’s face on them more clearly, but I was sated by Steel Wool’s dedication to making an impossible place feel possible.

Sound design!

Security Breach’s sound design is one of the more impressive aspects it delivers, which is no surprise since the sound design is a staple of the original games. Whether it’s the crank of music box birthday presents scattered across the building or the heaving machine stomps of animatronics giving chase, everything sounds perfect.

Interestingly, about half of the game’s musical score is a variation of its main theme performed by characters in-game (a theme that sounds a lot like Van Halen, as someone else noticed here). Electric and synthetic, the theme captures the ductile and glittery spirit of the 1980s without being too silly. Even so, the game is very much aware of its silliness at times.

The main theme is over-the-top, but it’s a distraction from what’s lurking behind the singing animals onstage. In the soft, ambient tones ringing throughout the halls of the Pizzaplex, the feeling of unease is seamlessly conveyed. The feeling comes full circle when the player realizes their sense of safety from gentle, shopping mall-esque music is just a party trick at their expense.

I guess you could say…the music breaches the player’s security (sorry, but you know I had to).

The animatronics!

Now, on to the robot rockstars of the game itself: the Glamrock Animatronics! Referred to as “bots” in-game, the funky, rock’n’rolly Glamrock Animatronics consist of Glamrock Freddy, Glamrock Chica, Roxanne Wolf, and Montgomery Gator. As the official mascots and main performers of Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex, they are the reason why anyone bought this game ( I mean that as a compliment).

Any Five Nights fan worth their salt knows that anything with an animal theme and a wiry endoskeleton underneath is not to be trusted. In Security Breach however, the big surprise is the player doesn’t escape the pizzeria all their own. Glamrock Freddy steps away from the villain spotlight of his previous iterations and is now a playable protagonist! As such, he is afforded special abilities to help Gregory survive, such as breaking down barriers, seeing items through walls, and allowing Gregory to hide inside his stomach hatch temporarily.

In general, the Glamrock Animatronics act similarly to one another, but they each have their own behaviors and attributes when it comes to hunting the player down:

To start, Chica is the slowest animatronic—which isn’t saying much when the bots are able to close distance fairly quickly for the first quarter of the game—but she’s the best at finding Gregory in hiding spots. Fortunately, she can be distracted by trash bins and could be found eating from them throughout the game.

Roxanne Wolf is the second fastest of the bots; she runs full speed at the player on sight and has a pounce attack to boot. She isn’t very good at finding Gregory in a hiding spot compared to Chica despite literally sniffing for him (during my first playthrough, she did this for all the times I hid from her. She never found me). She loves to taunt more than the other two bots, reminding the player constantly they have no friends (how did she know).

Montgomery Gator is the last of the Glamrock bots and is the fastest and most aggressive. Monty doesn’t appear as frequently as the other two, and ironically, he is the easiest to avoid due to his slow, tanky windup animation. Though he isn’t as prominent as his bandmates, Monty is immune to the stun weapons Gregory finds—the Fazer Blaster and Faz-Cam—due to his star-shaped glasses. Only until the player“decommissions” him will the stun weapons be able to work, giving the player those crucial seconds to run away.

So since I mentioned it, “decommission” is the term the game uses in place of ‘defeat’ or’ kill’. Decommissioning the bots as main objectives is what leads to each of their boss fights, though ‘fight’ here is a misnomer as it’s more a special evasion event. After decommissioning each bot, Gregory will collect parts from their broken bodies to upgrade Freddy with, allowing the Fazbear to use the aforementioned abilities to unearth further secrets in the Pizzaplex.

To be clear, decommissioning each animatronic doesn’t stop them from stalking the player—the bots hunt the player down for the whooole game. The player can only decommission two animatronics per playthrough before the doors reopen at 6 a.m., but they always confront and decommission Roxy in the main game.

In a decommissioned, ‘shattered’ state, as the fandom has decided to call them, the bots may be more or less susceptible to Gregory’s previous tactics. Aside from their strangely appealing shattered designs and slight changes in behavior, there doesn’t seem to be much of a reward or point in each bot’s decommission except to see the damage done to them. During my playthrough, the secrets revealed from Freddy’s upgrades felt less like a triumph and more of a chore than anything, their purpose, really, being to find more birthday presents, the main pick-’em-up collectibles of the game. Sometimes, the presents contain an upgrade for Gregory, like Fizzy Faz soda to lengthen his stamina or a special hoodie that makes him harder to see, but they usually contain plush toys and Five Nights memorabilia only hardcore fans would adore.

Besides the primary Glamrock Animatronics to avoid, the halls of the Pizzaplex are rife with S.T.A.F.F bots. These programmed security guards fill the space for the ‘enemy grunts’ of Security Breach, given how numerous they are and how easy they are to deal with…most of the time. If they catch you, instead of slapping you in the face with an untimely ‘game over,’ S.T.A.F.F bots activate an alarm that alerts the Glamrock Animatronics to Gregory’s location. Their inclusion in the game is vital, adding an extra helping of challenge to heighten the anxiety of getting caught. After all, if the game’s threats are relegated to just the Glamrock Animatronics—and certain event-sensitive bots I won’t spoil that the player encounters in their escape—the difficulty of Security Breach is greatly diminished. Considering the size of the Pizzaplex and the many hiding spots to choose from, the player would encounter too much wide empty space without S.T.A.F.F bots. Be that as it may, their implementation is far from perfect.

The S.TA.F.F bots loop in patterned paths. They do not wheel around to wherever they want, and with a trusty Fazwatch at the ready, players can keep track of where they and Freddy’s bandmates are by switching between cameras via the d-pad. The main problem is in their execution: how the Glamrock Animatronics instantly teleport to the player upon getting caught.

Where the Glamrock Animatronics spawn relative to Gregory is always in a random spot a few feet away, giving the player milliseconds to escape when they blip into action. The thrill of getting caught is there, but bots appearing out of thin air only reinforces their lack of weight and my disdain for unwanted surprises.

In the Resident Evil 2 remake and Haunting Ground for the PS2, the games’ stalkers are always searching for the player. Except for scripted sections in both games, Resident Evil 2’s Mr. X and Haunting Ground’s stalkers are constant, restless threats who can even hunt their prey off-screen. There’s a sense of permanence from these threats, a sense which is missing within this game’s stalker enemies. Truth be told, as the hours drifted on, the bots became environmental bothers, summoned to kill by event and alarm triggers but not present otherwise. They became more annoying than scary to deal with over time.

As for the animatronics’ characterization—despite Steel Wool Studios’ attempt to give dimension to the bots beyond their looks—there is a lot to be desired. The Glamrock Animatronics are bright and lively. Down to every tic and every step they make, they have believability in the Five Nights universe, but one never forgets these characters are machines at the end of the day.

Adding to the praise of Security Breach‘s sound design, the bots’ voices fit their characters well within the conceptual scope we have on them (hats off to Kellen Goff and Marta Svetek, Freddy and Gregory/Roxy’s respective voice actors). Monty’s Gator Golf area has a bayou theme, so it makes sense he has a Southern drawl when he speaks. Chica loves to eat, but she loves to work out via her own ‘program’ of exercise, so it follows that her voice is chipper and flighty (hehe, cause bird) like a 1980s fitness instructor. These neat details aside, the Glamrock Animatronics are mostly one-note.

There was an attempt to give dimension to each bot, but there’s a notable silence between them in execution. In other words, they don’t interact with each other, in gameplay and in cutscenes. Except for a single instance in the game, there is no unique dialogue between Freddy and his bandmates, which is what I was expecting since Gregory could hide inside him to explore the Pizzaplex. In fact, they literally see Gregory hide inside Freddy during a pivotal escape event, so why wouldn’t they say anything, or try to restrain and jump Freddy? Are they not on good terms with the singer and frontman of their own band, so much so that they don’t even like to talk to him? In fact, besides Roxy, none of the other animatronics refer to Freddy by name or acknowledge his existence. They don’t acknowledge each other, so maybe they all have social anxiety.

For all their talent and inflection, the voice actors were sorely, sorely underutilized in Security Breach.

The strongest selling point of the Glamrock Animatronics is their design, which Steel Wool did an amazing job on. It’s a shame the bots’ other aspects aren’t executed as effectively, not that the areas they are weakest in are from a lack of trying. What they really lack is substance, given to the player in a sample size like the first and only bite of a plastic birthday cake.

Things I didn’t really like!

The bugs!

For all of Security Breach‘s visuals and 1980s splendor, the myriad of bugs is hard to ignore. This jumbo pizza pie is topped with technical issues. I listed the most prominent bugs and issues I came across during my first playthrough and provided a small gallery. The list is as follows:

• Flashlight floats away from Gregory’s hand, making it appear as if light is coming directly from his palm.
• Flashlight and Fazcam/Fazer Blaster render together, overlaying each other’s imaging.
• Invisible walkways and invisible walls.
• Bots can get stuck on walls or get stuck on top of hiding spots, making it essentially impossible to escape without a ‘game over’.
• Besides Freddy’s icon, the charging stations, the player, and the staircases, the other icons do not appear anywhere on the map despite being in the map legend.
• Completed objectives in the ‘missions’ tab don’t always check off.
• Dialogue does not always play for the event it’s supposed to.
• The stalkers stand in place and don’t chase Gregory when he’s clearly in front of them.
• Literally touching a bot when they’re idle doesn’t prompt a ‘game over’ (I tried this with Chica after messing up a puzzle—see the segment below).
• The player can still get jumpscared despite being inside Freddy. This happened to me twice.
• Some ‘press square’ prompts don’t immediately appear despite standing before the interactable object, or not at all (in this case for the PS4, the arcade mini-games).
• Sometimes, assuming you get caught (and you will), the “Daycare Attendant” animatronic will get stuck on the playground bridge as he returns Gregory back to his starting position, forcing you to restart from your last save.
• The player is given the option to skip cutscenes but the prompt is non-functional. The only cutscene they can skip is the introduction, but why would you do that?!
• Monitoring cameras attached to the Fazwatch do not appear in-game. The cameras occupy blank space when looking at their placements, unless Fazbear Entertainment has cloaking technology.
• Animatronics sometimes teleport and get stuck atop/ clip through structures.
• Gregory’s crouching icon will be red (indicating the player has been seen and should find cover) but, again, animatronics will fail to notice you. The opposite happens as well when the icon is blue, indicating the player is safe.
• Massive framerate drops, especially during Monty’s decommission ‘boss fight’.

Though the PC version runs much more fluidly than the PS4 and Playstation 5 releases, there is no escaping the host of glitches and anomalies that were overlooked when releasing this game.

The time mechanic!

Carried over from the original games is another staple to the series: the clock. In the Five Nights games, given the fixed position of the player, they had to hold off the animatronics for six hours in-game (in the first two games, it was roughly eight minutes in real-time) to survive and progress to the next night. With the radical changes made in Security Breach, the clock is more or less a visual indicator of Gregory’s progress in the game. Thankfully, there is no time limit in exploring Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex or completing optional missions. Regardless, the way the clock is incorporated into the game bungles the story’s progression.

An adrenaline-filled encounter with Roxy will elapse 15 minutes according to the game, but traversing the utility tunnels beneath the pizzeria will take 40 minutes by Security Breach’s standards, even if it took 10 minutes in real-time. Instead of helping me keep track of the progress I made, the clock display confused me as it’s so fickle and inconsistent in how it determines completion. If every game starts at an A and ends at a Z, I expect the game to progress to the next letter accordingly (A-B-C, etc.), even if some segments are paced better than others. Security Breach started at A and ended at Z, but pole-vaulted over too many letters to get to the end.

Since the Pizzaplex closes at midnight and opens again at 6 a.m. per series tradition, there are an undefined six hours to use Freddy in the game. Freddy is indeed a playable protagonist, but he has a finite battery life, represented initially as five bars of cyan-colored energy the player can extend to seven bars through upgrades. Without any battery upgrades, Gregory can ride inside Freddy for about three minutes before his power goes out, resulting in a not-well-explained jumpscare from the bear. Because of this condition, the player should use Freddy sparingly until his battery is fully restored via charging stations for the next “hour.” Every time an hour passes, the power of the entire building goes out, and a certain animatronic hunts the player in an evasion sequence only survived by reaching a charging station.

For the handful of times this happens, evading this animatronic (I’ll call them “Clappy”) feels like a chore. I groaned every time Clappy’s dark blue ‘nighttime’ filter drenched my TV screen, realizing another hour passed. The first evasion event is startling not knowing what to do, but each event afterward ends as quickly as it starts since charging stations are always, always nearby. These segments are sicked onto the player by the all-mighty clock to remind them of the clock’s importance, but these segments are just unnecessary.

This one puzzle in particular

This is the worst puzzle I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with in years. The concept isn’t cryptic: Gregory needs to make a path through Chica’s Mazercise area to get to a vent to progress the game, but the puzzle’s application speaks to the developers’ lack of care here.

Basically, the player needs to press the correct button on the control pad to move the jazz cup-styled door panels where they need to be. The screen to the right of the buttons is far too small to get a decent visual of their actions, so they’re supposed to use the Fazwatch to get the right angle of the doors they’ve moved.

There are three glaring issues with this: one, the buttons are misaligned to the doors. It’s meant to line up like an X-Y axis grid, but the points of demarcation to each ‘square’ along the floor are so fuzzy that I wasn’t sure what panels I was moving despite utilizing the Fazwatch. Two: from my playing on the PS4, the button pressing needs to be surgically precise. I kept pressing the wrong button so often that I went as close as humanely possible to the point of clipping into the button textures to make sure I got it right. And third: there is no reset button to undo mistakes, so it’s best to save beforehand to mitigate the pain. I spent so much time on this segment, I had to look up how to solve it. Without a guide, I wouldn’t prevail on my own, so thanks Ruba.

The story!

I’m a casual fan of the Five Nights games, so I have surface-level knowledge of the lore. I know the original story and the main animatronics enough to have a semi-conversation with a hardcore fan. That said, whilst acknowledging this as a sort of sequel to a game I didn’t play but read up on, Security Breach’s story is all over the place, so much so it attracts the strongest flashlight onto its incompleteness. A mangled endoskeleton of a story, so to speak.

Understandably, many games will have unused content under the floorboards of their coding—many aspects change over time during development—that’s a fact. In Security Breach’s case, it’s easy to speculate on story changes based on the first trailer and compare it to its final form. What was ultimately delivered, however, only steered me in the direction of the experts.

Upon completing the game, copied and pasted onto multiple FNAF forums, all I could ask was, “Can anyone explain to me what happened?”

*Spoilers ahead*

At the heart of Security Breach, you’re a kid trying to escape from the funhouse of evil, though “escape” is a misnomer more than anything else. Escaping the building through a window or makeshift hole in the wall is disregarded because the ironclad security system keeps everything in, so Gregory’s only choice is to stay alive until the doors unlock at 6 a.m. That makes sense as it’s the series’ ethos, a familiar element that fits snugly into Security Breach’s design without sacrificing the new exploration angle. More than halfway through my playthrough, however, I had no idea I was responsible for solving the case of children going missing at the Pizzaplex.

Besides windup birthday presents, the player will come across lit duffle bags containing messages. They’re Security Breach’s version of game files that may clarify an objective, reveal lore, or lighten the mood with humor. The duffle bags are not necessary for completing the game but it’s best to retrieve every bag in passing. Even with all the clues and expository info I obtained, the deeper plot about abducted children Freddy brings up once, I recall, was something I immediately forgot about after he said it.

From what I understand, this is a fundamental plot point in the original game and lore. Are the missing children Freddy offhandedly mentioned the same kids from the first Five Nights at Freddy’s pizzeria years ago, or a new string of victims at Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex? Then, is the Mega Pizzaplex just a radical renovation of the first game’s pizzeria, or the second game’s pizzeria, or are the abductions happening again because of the original killer, or a copycat killer? Does Gregory have any connection to the victims? Why did Freddy say Gregory was “broken” at the start of the game? Why is Freddy Fazbear not “corrupted” like his bandmates, but can still kill Gregory under specific circumstances? I take responsibility for not knowing the chronology or the lore, game by game. Within the borders of Security Breach’s story, however, there are more questions than answers with little to nothing connecting the story joints.

Security Breach tends to introduce something exciting, teasing the player with clues and references on what or who such-and-such is or must be but then casts the mystery aside to jettison to the next exciting thing. It is all done without looking back. This is most apparent with Vanny, the person in the bunny suit seen in the ads, framed as the game’s main villain.

Though marketed as the central villain, Vanny is encountered twice in the game: at the very beginning when the player needs to escape from the first-floor security office after being captured by Vanessa, the only human security guard encountered in the game; and then in the Pizzaplex’s sewer system even though I was unable to see her—I only knew Vanny was there because her theme was playing and I heard her catchphrase, “are you having fun yet?” Given the blatant similarities in name (which Freddy reminds Gregory of stumbling upon Vanny’s “lair,” if the player chooses to go to Fazer Blast instead of Monty Golf with the one entry pass they find until acquiring another in the endgame), it’s too obvious that Vanessa and Vanny are the same person…or so it seems. But no, but actually. The developers knew the player would arrive at the same conclusion, so why say anything at all?

I had no idea what the writers wanted to do with Vanny. Perhaps because of a rushed schedule, the developers segmented her role despite her advertising presence and her appearance in two endings. There are four endings in this game and neither one helped my understanding.

Assuming the player darts safely to the front door at 6 a.m., Freddy offers the option to stay at the building: to discover the ‘truth’ and obtain the true ending of the game, or to leave. The player has options for two special endings if certain conditions are met but the ‘stay’ or ‘leave’ options are always offered. If the player stays, save stations are disabled. That means if they die once, they reset all the way back to the front door, potentially undoing two or three hours of progress as they are expected to deal with the other bot that wasn’t decommissioned in their first playthrough (which will either be Chica or Monty since Roxy, as previously mentioned, must be confronted before the front doors re-open).

In the true ending of Security Breach, Vanny seems to be a pawn of the true villain of the game: William Afton, the overarching antagonist of the Five Nights series who co-created the family franchise in the first place. Afton is confronted in one of the pizzerias of the original games hidden beneath the Pizzaplex (it’s unclear which pizzeria, there are many), and following his defeat, Gregory and Glamrock Freddy escape, go road-tripping, and the credits roll. I never got the true ending in my playthrough. I only know about it from searching online since my ending was, evidently, the worst possible one of the four, which was to leave. I chose it because it was the logical choice and because I was Faz-ed out by that point. But I never solved the mystery of the missing children.

Despite seeing the other endings I didn’t earn elsewhere because I’m a cheater in life, the head-scratching never stopped. I wasn’t expecting to be punished for choosing the most reasonable ending, since the missing children at the Pizzaplex were so brusquely mentioned, nor was I expecting to have more questions upon seeing the true ending that doesn’t even feature Vanny at all. Even the game forgot about her significance. To a hardcore fan, Afton’s appearance here seems as expectant as seeing Sigma in every Megaman X game, but as a casual fan, his introduction is abrupt with no build-up whatsoever: He’s just there. I understand if I had played the last game Afton’s role would maybe yield more importance, but I don’t think of Security Breach as a game only hardcore fans can play either. The clumsy handling of the story didn’t deter other aspects of the game, but my investment in Gregory and Freddy’s survival ended up being surface-level.

In conclusion…

For all its 1980s corniness and lighthearted self-mockery, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach is a seriously impressive project, but one that absolutely needed more time to be finished. The simple cat-and-mouse fun of horror games like Security Breach is a guilty pleasure of mine and the developers nailed it in terms of concept: a twitching death robot chases me, I run the hell out of there, much simple. When it came to the story, the bugs and glitches, and certain mechanics, however, there needed to be a lot of fine-tuning. Security Breach would garner much, much better reviews had this pizza pie of a game been given at least another few months to bake rather than rush a release before Christmas. I’m not a developer though—I’m an idiot. The game is noticeably incomplete, like a big gaping hole in Freddy’s chest The developers were onto something great for a moment until they weren’t.

Hopefully, the proposed patch fixes by Steel Wool Studios will remold this game into what it deserves to be.

All images were provided by me via PS4 screenshots.