Hello. My name is Philip Buchanon from Nyctodream Creations. This is my abridged review of the entire classic Five Nights at Maggie's series. Before we begin, here are a few rules; I will not mention anything regarding the plot *unless* it has something to do with the gameplay. All these opinions are *my opinions*. If you disagree, that's fine.

Five Nights at Maggie's (2016)

The game that started it all. I'll be honest and blunt, this game did not age well one bit. The gameplay is boring and repetitive. It's not just the lack of originality with the gameplay, it's how somewhat thoughtless mechanics make the game boring. The cameras, they suck. I don't mind fangames where the cams are hard to see through, as long as you can make out some of the details. Here tho, they don't show much details in the game at all. The areas are too dark and the static gets in the way too much. It doesn't help that using the cameras suck. You have to click at the very side of the screen and click onto the tablet to check the cameras and do the same thing twice to exit. It feels janky and leaves you prone to the enemies. It does not help that you are better off not using them since they serve 0 purpose. You can just check the doors with your flashlight and spam the vent button on the laptop. The animatronics are all boring. Almost all of them act the same way except they sometimes take different routes. Guppy, the animatronic that goes to the vent can easily be stopped just by using the vent button on the laptop like I said. He is barely a threat and can easily be taken care of. Doesn't help that he also act similar to the rest too. Night 5 is a joke. You face off one animatronic who acts like Guppy and only goes in one route. It's unintentionally easier than the rest of the nights. Also when you run out of power, it recharges, so not much challenge there either. FINAL VERDICT: Game didn't age well. So many thoughtless mechanics here and there, so many fangame cliches done wrong, and overall just... Boring. I suggest play other fangames. Like FNaM 2. Speaking of FNaM 2.

Five Nights at Maggie's 2 (2016)

The sequel to FNaM 1. And is so, so, SOOOO, much better than that game. The game is set in a museum. Bonus points for unique location (at the time anyway). The gameplay, while clunky in some areas, is miles better than FNaM 1. The game took some notes from FNaF 4. You can go to the door and try to listen for breathing. If you hear breathing, close the door. Sometimes you can check with your light if anyone is there. Most animatronics can be flashed upon regaurdless if they are close to your door or not, whilst one of them cannot. This is scary. Do you flash your light now yet risk getting a game over by Crackie (the animatronic who cannot be flashed) but waste time having to hear the breath of robots? Or take your time and listen to be safe but risk wasting time that you could have used on the other animatronics? More on them later. Some animatronics could be in front of you, while others can be in far away leaving you some time. This creates a risk and reward factor. When you see the animatronic in the far end of the hall, do you leave them there and attend to other animatronics? Or close the door now and be safe but waste time that you could have used on the other animatronics? Intentional or not, this is smart game design. Now onto other animatronics, Guppy is back and is right in front of you. Why? Who cares. Again, I won't mention much about the plot. Guppy is in complete darkness and you can flash your light on him. If he moves, keep your light on him. Yea, he is essentially a simplified Plushtrap clone, but still. The idea of a threat hiding in darkness and you don't know if he is moving or not or not knowing how close he is to you is scary. Returning Cerdi and newcomer Jerry arrive. They crawl through the vent on top of you that you can flash with your light. You can hear them coming through the vent with metal clanging. When you hear it, flash them away. You can even hear more metal clanging when they come closer. It makes me panic hearing this when dealing with Guppy, or Maggie, Crackie, and their friends. The cameras also make a return, and... Well, if you play the game similar to FNaF 4, they still don't serve much of a purpose. Rather this time, they are here to benefit you. If running to a door and having to listen to breathing isn't your cup of tea, you can check the cams and see who is next to your door. If it's anyone except Crackie, flash your light to see if they are near. If it is Crackie, then you have to listen for breathing. It's so beneficial. The game is scary too with the atmosphere. The whole area is dark with not many areas keeping the place bright. And the window in front of you is nothing but pitch black darkness for the firs 4 hours. But once you reach 5 AM, you start seeing the sunlight rising which gives you more determination and will to keep fighting for survival. All these mixed with the well balanced gameplay, makes FNaM 2 a more than major improvement over FNaM 1. That said, FNaM 2 does have its flaws. For one, it has its own cliches of course. Animatronics are broken because, yes... And besides the dark lighting, they are not that scary. The cams can still feel clunky because you have to click a button to go to it, click the very middle of the cams, wait for it to turn on, and press Z to have to bring out the keypad which makes it longer and clunkier than in FNaM 1. Granted, this can add to the horror in some areas. Speaking of cams, they still do not have much use here. Besides the halls that show which animatronic is going to your door, every camera is useless. But anyways...

FINAL VERDICT: It's really great. The game aged well, it's still a really scary horror experience. If you want a simple FNaF fan game that can terrify you, I cannot recommend FNaM 2 enough.

Five Nights at Maggie's 3 (2018)

Wow, this one came 2 years later...? Well, anyway. Five Nights at Maggie's 3. The prequel and original finale to the FNaM series. This game had so much missed potential to be a great fangame. It had so many great ideas that had mediocre execution. Let's talk about that. Each night starts in its own unique area of the building, similar to TJoC: SM. Night 1 starts in the office, where you can click on stuff and examine things, you get a short phrase describing what the object is. Soon, you will be met by Cerdi and Jerry. You have to use your flashlight to flash on them. They will then run to the door, and you have to close the door on them for a short time. You have to press and hold the doors down too until they leave. Your flashlight has limited batteries and drain quick, so you might think "Okay, I'll just turn off the flashlight from time to time". Well, no... You see, Cerdi and Jerry become more aggressive when the flashlight is off. When your light is off, you can see bits of the office. You can see Cerdi and Jerry when you squint your eyes a bit. This, again, does the risk and reward thing well. Do you keep your light on keeping the animatronics less active but risk making your flashlight die out? Or keep your light off to save battery power but make them more aggressive and risk them ganging up on you at the same time? Remember, you can only close one door at a time. I love how Night 1 is designed. It's not so infruriating and its simple. And once again, scary. Mixed with the fact that I can examine items that could be revealing some interesting plot stuff, I was excited as all hell to see what else the game has in store. And... I am sad to say... Not much. More on that in a bit. The game then goes to an 8 bit cutscene which gives some exposition on the game's lore which I will still not touch up upon. Then you go to the "Playing with your nightmares" minigame. This, in my opinion, is the worst part of FNaM 3 to me. The minigame, while it has relevance to FNaM 4's plot, is just... There for no reason other than to have an obligatory Nightmare animatronic. All you need to do here is make sure the animatronic arms don't reach the box of parts in front of you. How do you do that? Click on the doors they are in to close them. Repeat this until 6 AM and you are done. These things, are boring. All you need to do is spam whatever door has a very slow moving arm. This isn't scary and is really boring. It doesn't help that this part is (i think) required to progress through the game and you get no reward anyway. No 2 hours deducted the next night, nothing. If this were an optional minigame like "Fun with Plushtrap" I wouldn't mind, But it's mandatory. And you have to do this in between every in game night... Urrrgggghhh... Anyway, Night 2. Night 2 begins with you in Guppy's room. You have to check the boxes in there and collect stuff. Like, blueprints, newspapers, kids drawings...?, plushes? More on that in a bit. Then you see Guppy. Again, leave your flashlight off, Guppy will be more active. your flashlight does not 100% keep him away. It just makes him less aggressive. So how do you keep him away? Use the music box by pressing SPACE which... Plays... It's a small world... ANGRY FNATI PTSD FLASHBACKS Anyway, traumatising memories with a shitty fangame aside, this night is... Boring. Besides grabbing the stuff from the boxes, which does not matter which stuff you get as long as you get 7 of em, all you are doing really, is just spamming Spacebar and keeping your light on Guppy when the music box is recharging. This Night is not very well done or thought out when compared to Night 1. There aren't even that may interesting things to look at or examine. Lame. So onto Night 3. Where we are in some kind of storage space with Crackie. Again, you collect your stuff as per usual. And then you deal with Crackie. How do you deal with him? Flash your light on him when you hear footsteps. Thing is, I don't know if it's just because I suck so badly, but Crackie moves way too much or my liking. Whenever I somewhat miss my light off of him just for a while, I am suddenly too late and I get a game over. In fact, this is the first time I died in this game. Oh yea... Speaking of. Let's talk about the topic of jumpscares. FNaM 1 and 2 had these jumpscare noises thhat sounded like loud grinding metal. Which is oddly realistic for these metal robots. Here? They're laughable. It's legit just some man screaming. I know it's relevant to the plot because Cerdi and Jerry are like possessed by adult humans. But couldn't the screams be somewhat disguised to make it less sounding like a human? It also does not make sense with Crackie and Guppy since, I don't think the game mentions them being possessed. So yea. Jumpscares are not great. Night 3 has the possibility to be good but Crackie is too frustrating for my liking. Okay, Night 4 you... Do some lore stuff. Idk, you just examine your surroundings, find a note saying you should go to the backstage area or something. Again, lore stuff I will not mention so whatever. Then you have the option to go to Night 5. But for the sake of this review, I choose yes. Here you discover a twist of what happened to the person who sent you the notes and you collect more evidence in the form of newspapers and... Drawings... And then you fight of Cerdi and Jerry one last time with the use of your light. Keep your light on them regaurdless of how near they are to you and that's it. Kind of boring and anti climatic. And you know what? Fine, let's mention the lore of FNaM 3 just for a minute... You play as an inspector of the place trying to examine things as you go along to try and find out what happened to the area before shit went to hell and because the last inspector went missing. Alright. The thing is... This makes 0 sense with the context of the gameplay. Why do you have to stay until 6 AM? Why are we collecting plushies and kids drawings of all things? Why are we collecting newspapers? If there are newspapers, wouldn't the public see them because they are published by a company that you can get in stores? Yea... The context of us being a private investigator, while it works in some gray areas, makes no complete in context with the gameplay of FNaM 3. FINAL VERDICT: This game had so many chances to be great. It showed promising mechanics in Night 1 and good build up to the lore of the game. But the mechanics become half arsed as soon as Night 2 arrives. And I think it's because... Manuel didnt wanna do much with this game. I think around 2017-2018 he wanted to just finish the game and move on. Honestly I cannot say I blame him. FNaF's popularity was at an all time low in that time period. And its sad. This game had so much missed potential. Wanna know what didnt tho? FNaM 4.

Five Nights at Maggie's 4 (2020)

This game came out also two years later. Hm. Well, unlike with FNaM 3, I'd say this one was worth the wait. FNaM 4 in my opinion is the best and most polished one of the entire classic series. Truly, a great way to end the classic series. Let's see how great it is with its gameplay. Unlike the third installment, FNaM 4 reverts back to the classic style of sit in one area and survive until 6 as opposed to FNaM 3's sit in one new location a night and survive until 6... Yea. Well anyway, what do we have in our disposal? Well, we have 6 cameras this time, fewer than in FNaM 1 and 2, but hey, it's not like in 3 where there are none. Tho, to be fair, I don't think 3 would've benefited with or without it since it wasn't designed with cameras in mind but, whatever. Taking notes from FNaF 3 and Pizzeria Sim, you have a mic/megaphone that you can click on that will let you play the musical recording of... I don't know what the song is called. I know it is a real song and it's well known but I forgot its name. Feel free to tell me in the comments. Anyway, it's used to lure the returning animatronics, Cerdi and Jerry into areas where you want them to be in. The cameras work differently too, you don't just click on a button and you can see the entire camera feed once at a time, instead, you get to see all 6 cameras (with the exception of one of them which is disabled). Nice little twist with the cameras there. And FINALLY, the cameras don't feel janky to use. Gone are the days of having to click a bar to your side and sluggishly click or press a few things in order to just view the camera, it's pretty much like most other fan game where you just scroll to the bottom of the screen and your tablet instantly pops up. I love it this way. Now Cerdi and Jerry, while being the *biggest* threats, they are not the *only* threats. The main threats are the new animatronics, Flower the Bird, Peter the Panda, and Timmy the Tiger. All of whom replace Maggie, Lola, and Chanchi from the first 2 games. I kinda don't get why these two exist as opposed to just using old animatronics again with new redesigns, especially since this series is called Five Nights at *Maggie's* after all. But whatever, I like these animatronics anyway in terms of looks. Plus points for being a species of robots that are hardly ever seen before. Like, name the last time you saw a Panda or Tiger animatronic? Yeah, I thought so. Sure, Peter looks less like a panda and more like Blake the Badger from POPGOES (2016), probably because of how thin he looks for a panda, but whatever (I say that a lot, don't I?) Anyway, how do they play? Here is where the next feature of FNaM 4 comes into play, the movement detector. You see, unlike Cerdi and Jerry who can be seen on cams, Flower and her friends, can't. They are hiding from the cameras. They can only be detected with the movement sensors. This, is smart. You can't just always rely on the cameras to help you, you need to balance between viewing the cams and the motion sensors. Oh, and they are not affected by the sounds either unlike with Cerdi and Jerry. When they come into your office, you will hear lights buzzing. You can even see them come to your office when you use the motion sensors. When that happens, you will be performing what I think, is the scariest part of all of FNaM 4. You have to quickly hide in the locker FNaF 2 style. It does not just end there tho. Soon, the animatronics would very quickly appear in front of you. Then you have to close your eyes using SPACEBAR for an unspecified amount of time before you can open them again and continue with what you were doing. This. Is horrific in so many genius ways. The way how the animatronics move quickly to stare in your direction where under a very very dark shade with piercing white pupils is unnerving, the fact that you have to close your eyes and you do not know when the animatronic will leave because there is no audio or visual clue to them leaving, and the fact that you are concerned over the fact that you have to waste your time with these animatronics when you are not paying attention to Cerdi and Jerry coming to swipe at your ass or CG fucking up the vents which will quickly, yet still kinda slowly fill up your Carbon Monoxide meter and kill you. This mechanic causes me so much stress for all the fun reasons. Oh yea.... CG and the Monoxide meter. Let's get to those. Introducing two new returning characters stitched into one, CG, which I swear CG stands for Crackie Guppy. Why? Because it's that. It's Crackie and Guppy mixed into one terrifying unholy abomination. Why this thing is here in a kid's restaurant of all things is a riddle I cannot solve. Anyways, he attack similarly to Flower and her friends, yk, he will be in the office and you need to hide in a locker. But he takes a route that gives you another problem you need to solve. Remember the monoxide meter? CG will appear in the backroom and go to the vents. if he passes through one of the 6 vents, he breaks them completely, forcing you to have to repair it similar to how you'd rewind the music box in FNaF 2. Unlike, the music box however, you only have to rewind them up to 30% at least before they hit danger limit and start filling up the monoxide meter. Essentially, it's like the music box, only nowhere near as frustrating for the wrong reasons. I love how this was handled. Essentially making FNaM 4 one big game of risk and reward. I know I have been saying that to death, but I love the idea of risk and reward in any game. When you hear lights buzzing, do you risk playing the audio first to distract Cerdi and Jerry and/or fix one of the vents for a bit first to be safe from the monoxide meter and Cerdi and Jerry but be at major risk from CG, Flower and her friends? Or go in the locker first to be safe from the 4 animatronics but risk the monoxide meter getting higher and Cerdi and Jerry coming closer? Do you go to the vent maps to fix the vents themselves first completely to be safe from the monoxide meter while risking yourself to being robot food to literally everyone else? FNaM 4 has this constant well balanced and designed sense of panic and stress. And is something imo what FNaF 2 should have been. It made me panic and freaked out by the sheer number of things going on, and when I die, I never feel like it's because of shit RNG. That being said... I still think FNaM 2 is the scariest game here. Don't get me wrong, FNaM 4 is a game I have much more fun with than FNaM 2. But 2 freaked me out more with the more with how it's almost completely dark there, but not straight up pitch black, the way with how unpredictable and random the animatronics can be at times. More random than in 4. The way how the character sometimes move in a slow and janky manner which adds to the horror. But I still see 2 and 4 as great games on their own right. That and, I just find FNaF 4 as the scariest game in the franchise and FNaM 2 is inspired by 4, so that may have something to do with it as well.

FINAL VERDICT: FNaM 4 is a great, fun, stress inducing, and thrilling horror game. Similar to 2, if you want a simple FNaF fan game that can stand on its own without being seen too much as a blatant copy but does borrow mechanics? I can't recommend FNaM 4 and even 2 enough. These are great games, don't require much space to be played, and can be a fun time waster.

I enjoyed reviewing these fan games. I still hold them to be enjoyable fnaf styled games even after all this time. And coming from someone who is a no longer a fan of the main series, THIS is saying a hell of a damn lot. What I loved most about this series is, it wasn't scared of being unoriginal and instead tried to borrow mechanics from other games and make something great out of it. I don't mind originality, it can be a great thing. But I don't like games that try to be original just for the sake of being original. FNaM imo, 2 and 4 at least, and to a lesser extent, Night 1 of FNaM 3, took what I loved about the main series and tried to make god stuff out of it and wasn't afraid to be unoriginal to at least flesh out certain features. Manuel Genaro, the dev behind these games, I cannot thank you enough for the effort you poured into these games. I look forward to whatever you decide to make next. I look forward to playing your reimagining of FNaM 1 coming out real soon. Thank you for making these great games. And thank you all for spending the time reading the reviews of my entire series.

~ Philip Buchanon, Nyctodream Creations