Five Nights at Freddy’s has been an iconic franchise for over a decade. There have been a multitude of games, spin offs, homages and even movies. This new game takes a pixelated adventure take at the genre with mixed results.

The premise of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit centers around a young and troubled kid called Oswald. His dad is struggling to find good work so Oswald is left at a local pizzeria for hours at a time as a form of safe place to stay.

Exploring the pizzeria he finds an old ball pit that transports him back to the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza just as the animatronics go haywire and start chasing all the kids. This is the disaster that closed the original restaurant and Oswald is all of a sudden in the thick of the terrifying situation.

The game then throws a new loop in the mix, as Oswald is trying to escape he goes back into the ball pit and finds himself back in his timeline. He of course goes to his Dad for help but as they are investigating a homicidal Golden Rabbit animatronic nabs Oswald’s Dad and takes his place in the present day.

With this setup the 2.5d adventure game truly kicks off. No one realizes this crazed animatronic is impersonating a human so Oswald has to try and go back and forth through time to resolve it.

Played out like a typical adventure game Oswald needs to collect items, solve simple puzzles, avoid enemies and try to save his Dad and escape the creatures. There are a number of neat sequences where the crazed Rabbit is stalking Oswald and he has to hide in a similar way to the Alien: Isolation game.

Overall the game struggled to get its hooks into me. I could tell the developer MegaCat Studios really had a passionate take on the universe, but I found it leaned too Goosebumps style creepy kid friendly for me.

There is an attempt at plenty of scares, and at times they were effective, but the, at times, monotonous back and forth nature of adventure games blunted a lot of those moments.

Many of the puzzles require going to present day, finding some items, heading back to the 80’s pizzeria and dealing with situations and then heading home to pass a night. Surviving the five nights and saving your Dad is the key goal, but it required a lot of back and forth that just did not click with me.

Thankfully the game presentation was well done, the retro pixelated adventure game aesthetic coupled with great designs for the creatures were really effective. Sound design also really helped the scares and set the tone of the scenario in an audibly satisfying way.

Ultimately I could see the love and passion for the series in Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit and likely hardcore fans will love this game. For me as a casual sideways fan it just did not grab my attention and it was a game I forgot pretty much as soon as I finished it.

We were provided a PS5 key by the publisher for Review purposes. Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit is available right now for PC via Steam, Xbox Series One|X|S, and PlayStation 4|5, a Nintendo Switch version coming out at a later date..