Five Nights at Freddy’s [official site] creator Scott Cawthon has confirmed that while there won’t be a fifth game in the main series – “the story is complete” – there will be another FNAF game soon. It’s an RPG:

“The new game that I’m working on will be called FNAF World. It will not be a horror game, but a role playing game where you create a party using the huge selection of characters from the FNaF games, including the classic, withered, toy, phantom, and nightmare versions.”

Cawthon had planned to release a demo in time for Halloween but the game’s “significantly larger” scope means that won’t be possible. There will be a demo, however, as soon as possible.

Fair to say this isn’t a news story I expected to be writing this morning. It makes perfect sense though – you only need to look at the literal thousands of FNAF fangames in existence to realise how much people enjoy exploring the unseen corners of Freddy’s world. An official game that lets fans play as the characters rather than hiding from them seems like a natural step.

From the outside of the fandom looking in, FNAF seems like such a peculiar success story. How did monstrously terrifying animatronic characters become subjects for so much adoration? Cawthon’s cleverly implied snippets of backstory certainly helped, as did the references to mysteries, tragedies and horrors in the world around Freddy’s. I wonder if there’s also a cooling effect of a sort – the intensity and claustrophobia of the games’ central mechanic being offset by imagined scenarios in which there is something other than horror and impending death. The fan creations and now FNAF World might serve a similar function to the increasing comedic elements in series like Child’s Play and Nightmare On Elm Street, de-fanging the fear.

When I saw the title, Five Nights at Freddy’s World, I thought that the next game was either going to be set in a FNAF theme park or that there was actually going to be a real life FNAF theme park. I’m guessing that FNAF World might be slightly less grounded in the fiction of the original series, however, given that I can’t think of a reason for a party of withered and nightmare animatronics to be setting off on adventures in a theme park based on themselves.

I’d love to see a real life Freddy’s theme park though just so that I could look forward to the inevitable EuroFreddy’s spin-off closing down for maintenance and never reopening. Imagine the pictures of it twenty years from now, packed with decaying horrorshows. Nightmare fuel of the highest octane.

Graham just mentioned his surprise that there isn’t a Telltale FNAF game yet. I now share that surprise.