‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Review: The Iconic Game Becomes a Tedious Adaptation of Its Wiki Page

You’re all alone in the middle of the night, inside a dilapidated third-rate Chuck E. Cheese. The paint is cracking. The games are busted. The rooms are empty except for the rotting animatronic mascots whose unconvincing “friendly” faces are permanently contorted in giant, toothy grins. When you look away from these rotting mechanical puppets you hear a noise. When you look back at them… they’ve moved.

The genius of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” the video game, is largely conceptual. It’s a cocktail of anti-nostalgia, wherein childhood iconography gets grossly corrupted by the ravages of time and retroactive context. Something terrible happened here.