Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 Confirmed

Thought Five Nights At Freddy’s was over? Well think again. There aren’t a lot of people out there with the ability to drive the internet absolutely crazy with nothing but a single, static picture. But Scott Cawthon, the creator of the Five Nights At Freddy’s series, is one of those people. Earlier today an image appeared on his website, scottgames, of Springtrap – the main antagonist of his last game, Five Nights At Freddy’s 3. The corner of the image contains a caption reading “The final chapter,” and a 31st October release date. Plus, the file name of the image is “4”.

At the time of writing, the website was crashing two out of three times, so in case you’re unable to feast your eyeballs on the latest Five Nights At Freddy’s hype-machine, here it is:

Creepy, right? We’ve got Springtrap with what appear to be tiny Freddy heads poking out of his chest. But that’s not what’s got the fans in a tizz. The fans are freaking out because of the hat. Earlier in the year, Cawthon’s site featured this image:

Fans interpreted the image of Freddy’s hat on the floor to mean the series was finished. It was supposedly Cawthon’s way of saying he’d hung up his Freddy hat for good, the series concluded with the third installment. It was a fair assumption, considering the last game more or less tied up all the story’s loose ends (albeit in Cawthon’s cryptic way). But a few weeks ago that image was replaced with another:

Yes, Scott Cawthon can even get people to freak out over a blank image. Cawthon’s shown time and time again that there’s nothing he loves more than to tease his fans, and with the hat gone fans were going wild over the possibility of another game. It turns out they were right.

The Five Nights At Freddy’s series owes much of its success to its popularity with Let’s Players on YouTube, with all three of the previous games collecting millions of views across countless channels. Because, you know, if there’s one thing more enjoyable than playing a horror game, it’s watching other people play horror games. But outside of the Freddy fans, the reaction to the announcement of fourth Five Nights At Freddy’s is more along the lines of meh. There have been three Five Nights At Freddy’s games in the past nine months and people seem to be tiring of the franchise. Even Markiplier, who among the larger YouTube channels has spent the most time with the games, said during his playthrough of Five Nights At Freddy’s 3, “I don’t think this series needs another game.” Among those YouTubers who played the previous three games, there seems to be consensus that yes, they will of course play it, but it’s become a chore.

I love watching grown adults leap out of their chairs in terror as much as the next person, but the next Five Nights At Freddy’s better feature something that’s actually different to the last three.