Games: Five Nights at Freddy's | Five Nights at Freddy's 2 | Five Nights at Freddy's 3 | Five Nights at Freddy's 4 | Five Nights at Freddy's World | Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location | Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator | Ultimate Custom Night | Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted | Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery | Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach
Novels: Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Twisted Ones | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet | Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: The premise is that, 30 years after the first game, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria has been reopened as a horror attraction in response to in-universe Urban Legends. While a few people found it strange, many locations with gruesome or unpleasant histories do tend to gather tourists in the real world (examples include the house where Lizzie Borden killed her parents, locations where Jack the Ripper is said to have killed people, submarine trips to the Titanic, and countless others). Some people just have weird tastes.
- Common Knowledge: It's widely believed that the reason Springtrap is drawn by the audio lures of children is because William Afton is such an evil child murderer that he will instantly rush to murder any potential child he hears, regardless of how many times he's been fooled by it before. This isn't the case. As stated by Phone Dude, when the mascots are in animatronic mode, they are set to stay by noise, with the intention that they'll always be by kids during a party. Because Afton died during a springlock failure, the Spring Bonnie suit he's trapped in is still set in this mode. Afton knows full well that there are no actual children in the building; the suit's programming is just forcing him to move against his will.
- Contested Sequel: The FNAF fanbase is fairly polarized at this point; some argue that the game's innovations and twists on the algorithm made it a breath of fresh air, but others state that the jump scares are becoming more wooden and predictable than ever before, and that the game showcases signs of sequelitis due to how seemingly rushed it was.
- Creepy Awesome:
- Springtrap looks like a corpse, has Glowing Eyes of Doom, and contains the corpse of William Afton. He also has a cool design and is the most brutally violent of the animatronics, not counting 4.
- The phantoms as well, being damaged, burned versions of the classic and toy animatronics.
- Genius Bonus: As with previous games, Scott has cleverly hidden some well-known classical music pieces:
- "Stage 01" uses the main motif of Swan Lake.
- "BB's air adventure" features "Faites-lui mes aveux" from the Faust opera.
- "Glitch" (Shadow Bonnie's minigame) has Schubert's "Ständchen" (Serenade)
- "Happiest Day" and the Bad Ending feature Brahms' Waltz, Op.39, No.15.
- Karmic Overkill: William Afton, a child-murdering Serial Killer, suffers a springlock failure, where an animatronic endoskeleton crushes one's body, with them being alive for long enough to realize they are dying. And then, he possesses his corpse, and is left slumped against a wall in a boarded-up room for thirty years. While the majority views this as a well-deserved moment, others (mostly the ones who paint him in a sympathetic light) say even he didn't deserve that. However given how much of a bastard he was shown to be in future games, this reaction has died down for the most part.
- Nausea Fuel: While easy to miss at first glance, the murderer's corpse is visible through the worn-out parts of Springtrap's suit.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Balloon Boy is now just about as terrifying as, say, the Puppet or Springtrap itself, if not slightly worse. Also, he jumpscares you now.
- Rewatch Bonus: After playing the game to completion, take another look at the trailer
. It flat-out shows what appears to be someone's death, but you won't realize it until you see the game's ending. The text even functions in the same way. It features twitching yellow letters in a more Retraux style that suddenly turn red with a pool of red lines appearing underneath them, much like the style in which the death was rendered. - Ron the Death Eater:
- A fairly popular fan theory before the game's release was that Phone Guy was the killer. This game makes it extremely unlikely, as he canonically died before the murderer did, but a good number of fans still insist he's the killer anyway. Though these have mostly disappeared after Sister Location revealed Purple Guy/William Afton to be an Evil Brit in contrast to the Minnesota Nice Phone Guy.
- In a further Broken Base on the topic, there's even an argument over whether Purple Man died before or after Phone Guy, depending on your interpretation of the timing of the safe rooms being sealed.
- Fans have continued to run with these theories, even after the Murderer was revealed in Sister Location to be an Evil Brit, meaning he's very likely not the Minnesota Nice Phone Guy.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop: Compared to the second game, the third seems to be easier, with only one animatronic. However, the game still has its curve-balls, such as having a new maintenance mechanic to take care of and relying on much more hallucinations to mess the player up. Furthermore, because Fazbear's Fright burnt down after the sixth night, there is no custom night. Justified, because there's only one animatronic to deal with, while the difficulty of the 4/20 and 10/20 modes was based on the A.I. of several animatronics and having to juggle dealing with all of them (and their respective in-game mechanics) at once, with extremely little margin for error.
- That One Sidequest: If you want to get the good ending on the mobile version, you'd better pray that you don't screw up any of the minigames, especially STAGE 01, since all of them apart from BB's Air Adventure aren't selectable whenever you wish, having taken the place of the post-night minigames. Fail to gain the cake ending on any of them and you'll need to restart from night one. It's also a lot easier to screw yourself over due to the altering of the stages and the removal of the jump button.
- Ugly Cute: In a weird way, Springtrap. The way it crawls around the vents is kind of cute, and its Slasher Smile looks more like a big, goofy grin in some shots. Although who Springtrap really is isn't so cute.
