Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location

Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location is a survival horror video game where the player takes the role of a late night technician who must survive against murderous animatronics each shift.[1] Unlike previous Five Nights at Freddy's games, the player can crawl between different rooms and the objective changes each of the five nights.[2]

The occasional post-death minigames return from Five Nights at Freddy's 2; when a game ends, the player may be given a chance to play an 8-bit mini-game where they control Circus Baby and must deliver cupcakes to children. At the end of the minigame, the player has to deliver an ice cream cone to a little girl, ending in the girl's death. Completing this minigame grants access to the Night 5 secret level; a near-recreation of the gameplay in the original Five Nights at Freddy's, bringing back survival gameplay.

Completing all five nights unlocks extra features: pictures and blueprints of the game's animatronics, their making-of, a map of the facility, and menu access to Circus Baby's cupcake minigame. As of the December 1, 2016 update, clearing all nights also unlocks the non-canon Custom Night mode, which is set in a modified version of the Night 5 secret room. The player can choose from several modes and difficulty settings, facing new animatronics, and must conserve both power and oxygen supplies in order to survive. Completing these modes allows the player to view a series of cutscenes that have been declared as part of the series canon; all except the last scene are in 8-bit resolution.

An achievement system exists in the form of four stars, obtained by unlocking both of the game's endings, completing the Circus Baby minigame, and completing the hardest difficulty on each custom night preset. Completing each custom night preset on each mode grants its own star in the specific custom night mode.

Like in all Five Nights at Freddy's games, failure to defend oneself from the hostile animatronic characters will result in a jumpscare.

The game begins with an interviewer questioning William Afton (voiced by PJ Heywood), co-founder of Fazbear Entertainment Inc. and founder of Afton Robotics, LLC — the company responsible for creating the game's animatronic characters — on unspecified design choices he made while building the animatronics. Afton proceeds to list several features of the animatronic Circus Baby (voiced by Heather Masters) such as dispensing ice cream, inflating balloons, taking song requests, and dancing to them. The interviewer is unsatisfied with the answer, as the features Afton mentioned are not what he was referring to.

The perspective then switches to Michael, a new employee of Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental, an underground facility where various animatronics are stored, to be rented out to children's birthday parties during the day. These animatronics originated from Circus Baby's Pizza World, a sister location of the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza restaurant from the first game which was shut down shortly before its planned opening due to supposed gas leaks. Every night, Michael is assigned maintenance tasks by the facility's glitchy artificial intelligence HandUnit (voiced by Andy Field) that he must finish before morning.[3]

On the second night, the power goes out and the animatronics come to life. Circus Baby begins to communicate with Michael, warning that the other animatronics will kill him if they catch him, and gives instructions to help Michael survive as he goes to reset the circuit breakers. The following night, Michael is ambushed by the animatronic Funtime Foxy and hidden in a springlock suit overnight by Circus Baby. Mike is left to repel the tiny Minireenas from crawling into the suit before freeing himself. On the fifth night, Mike finds two hanged technicians where the animatronics should be, which prevents HandUnit from noticing they are missing. Circus Baby instructs Mike to destroy her empty body by going to the Scooping Room, where endoskeletons are violently "scooped" out of the animatronics' exterior shells, to "save what is good so the rest can be destroyed". She soon tells him that he is being followed by the animatronic Ballora, who intends to kill him.

Between nights, Mike watches an animated sitcom at home and Elizabeth, William’s daughter, is heard begging him to play with Circus Baby, despite her father's insistence that she must stay away.

Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) developer Scott Cawthon stated that Five Nights at Freddy's 4 (2015) would be the final game in the series. However, he announced Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location on his website in April 2016 with the tagline, "There was never just one."[4] A trailer was uploaded online on May 21.[5][6] The release date was later confirmed to be October 7. In October, Cawthon announced he was delaying the game to make certain dark plot elements more "kid-friendly"; this was revealed to be trolling.[7]

Sister Location was first released on Steam. Shortly after, a patch was released that eased the difficulty of the fourth night, which many players had complained about.[8] It was the first FNaF game to feature professional voice acting. The development of Sister Location was the longest in the series yet: the previous four were all released within a year. Rock Paper Shotgun believed that Cawthon was being more cautious after spin-off FNaF World (2016) was panned as "rushed"; retrospectively, The A.V. Club opined that "the extra time and care Cawthon put into both the game’s writing, and its production values" led to a "more ambitious sequel".[4][9]

Downloadable content for a non-canon Custom Night was later added.[10] Sister Location was also ported to Android. On January 3, 2017, a mobile port for iOS devices was released on the App Store.[11] In March 2020, Clickteam released a remastered version of the iOS port closer to the Steam version, as they had done with previous games.[12] They also released a Nintendo Switch port on June 18.[13] Ports for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were released respectively on July 10 and July 21, while Maximum Games included the first five games in the Five Nights at Freddy’s: Core Collection, which was released for the Xbox One, PS4 and Switch on January 12, 2021.[14]

Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location received mixed reviews. Critics praised the voice acting, especially Masters.[17][9][15] GameCrate and Kotaku praised the use of humor in addition to horror in the script—the latter noted an early scene where HandUnit glitches out and misinterprets the character's name as "Eggs Benedict".[17][18]

Destructoid rated the game 6/10,[15] while GameCrate rated it 7.50/10.[17] Rob Rich of Gamezebo gave the mobile version a decent review, giving the game 3 out of 5 stars, saying, "I don't necessarily think Sister Location is the worst mobile iteration of the FNaF series, but it's certainly not the best despite the overall improved visuals."[16]