Parents' Guide to Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted

For the past five years, gamers have had their nightmares fueled five nights at a time by the animatronic murder machines of Fazbear Entertainment. Five Night's at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted serves as a sort of demented mix tape of the previous games, bringing players closer to the jump scares than ever before. One of the interesting things about Help Wanted is how it presents the previous events in ways that feel slightly different and unique to fans. The stories have slight alterations due to the idea that this VR game is based on urban legends and skewed perspectives from reports. The biggest draw of Five Nights at Freddy's has always been the tension of waiting for the unexpected, and this story element sets players up with a false sense of familiarity that quickly crumbles as things unfold. But that's just the half of it. The idea that something else has made its way into the simulation adds an extra level of anxiety.

Help Wanted makes fantastic use of the VR environment to create a truly immersive (and terrifying) experience. Gameplay's simple and relatively intuitive, and the puzzles in and of themselves aren't particularly difficult. But trying to perform those actions and solve those puzzles with the looming fear that the proverbial bogeyman is lurking in the shadows is where the real challenge lies. You can't help but constantly look over your shoulder as you try to fix key systems, solve puzzles, recover logs, and simply stay alive. The fact that the world exists all around you this time makes that feeling of dread even more real. Most of the time, it genuinely feels like you're isolated and trapped, and you almost forget that you can actually take off the VR headset to escape back into the real world. It all comes together to make Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted the best entry yet in the FNAF series, and one of the most hair-raising VR experiences to date.