Recent reviews by nat40

is nice

My friends and I were pretty excited to play this game, and it being playable on steam was icing on the cake. Now I'm able to stream it to them since its a bit of a pricey game with some respectable PC requirements. However, while this game does look very good on say, edited videos and clips on YT, watching it live or playing it will show the excess amount of cracks that keeps this game at either best case frustrating to worst case Sonic Boom: RoL levels of unplayable.
I will say that the game theoretically has a good experience, a lot of tense and thrilling moments, decent challenges, good art direction and sound design, and that good ol' Scott Cawthon charm. I feel most of the issues comes down to execution, not like weird design choices or bad pacing, I mean how the game plays on an engine level. Higher graphics and Raytracing absolutely destroys the game by making it super choppy when looking around. I was forced to play on the lowest settings on my RTX 3070, and this is all apparent in the first MINUTE of gameplay (hell it was showing up in the title screen). Just screen tearing and massive frame drops that make the game lag and disorients the player (I'm rarely a stickler for things like technical graphics and stuff like that.).
The game is poorly optimized and doesn't really feel finished. A lot of areas load in front of you, and have questionable lighting choices even for a horror game. There are many cutscenes that just look way too dark and make it difficult to see, when direction wise there doesn't seem to be an emphasis on giving a mystery to a character. If you can look past the visual bugs, the game is filled to the brim with game breaking glitches and plenty of minor ones that can easily get you a game over if you're not ready for it. You can easily set off events that weren't supposed to happen and softlock the game or force a death. These issues are impossible to ignore and I've even thought to myself multiple times "Were there playtesters? Why didn't anyone listen? There's no way they would let this launch at this state? There are a lot of rookie mistakes in here."
I haven't even talked about the base game, how would it play if it were completely bug free? Well, there's a lot of highs and lows. The tense moments feel great and bring back the similar feeling of "Panic and Fear while Puzzling" the series has always done well. But the game does leave the player with plenty of "bad confusion" or "bad conveyance." The first few FNaF games did give the player confusion with vague advice from the phone guy, but that added to the experience. This game clearly tells you the mechanics which leaves the player to just complete the challenge, which is nice... Until you're wandering the colossal building for 10 minutes because they want you to find a pin in a haystack, or when you think you've picked up an enemy's pattern/quirk then they teleport through a wall or do something that doesn't feel right game design wise. I know I'm being pretty vague, but its a subtle yet common problem. These lows probably wouldn't feel that bad if the game wasn't so buggy, but I just wanted to put it out there.
This game has so much potential to be a really good experience, but I can't recommend a 40 dollar unfinished game that takes like 20+ hours to 100% . Either wait for it to go on sale, or just watch a YTuber play it.