FNAF Fan Games: The Best Free Five Nights Fan Games

Fan games are almost as old as Five Nights at Freddy's itself. Scott Cawthon's formula, a night shift, a few cameras, something that moves when you are not looking, is simple enough for one person to build on, and Game Jolt filled up with fan games. Most are forgotten; a handful built followings in the tens of thousands and invented their own characters and stories. These are the ones worth playing, all free on PC.

Five Nights at Candy's is the series most players reach for first. Emil Macko replaced Freddy's band with a cat-themed burger restaurant, then kept changing the rules: the second game takes away your doors and leaves you a phone light and a long factory hallway, and the third puts you in a child's bedroom with a flashlight, a closet and the Monster Rat, in the manner of Five Nights at Freddy's 4. If you only play one fan series, make it this one.

The Joy of Creation: Story Mode is the biggest departure. It is in full 3D, needs a reasonably strong PC, and splits one night into five levels: a crib with a sanity meter, a living room where you see through the animatronics' eyes, an office with a generator and cameras, a basement and an attic. It uses the official characters, burned and twisted, rather than a cast of its own. The Glitched Attraction takes the same 3D, on-foot approach further: six free-roam escape rooms built on the series' own locations, from the FNAF 4 bedroom to Sister Location, each with its animatronics and a puzzle of its own.

One Night at Flumpty's starts as a joke, an egg with a fixed grin and his storybook friends, and turns out to be properly tense. Each game hands you a different set of tools, a light switch and a laptop in the second, a camera flash and a freezing room in the third, and every character has its own rule to learn. They are the easiest fan games to play on a phone: Clickteam sells all three on the App Store and Google Play.

If you would rather relive the official story, three fan games stay close to it. Five Nights at Freddy's: In Real Time remakes the first game with the animatronics moving on the camera feeds as you watch, and they hide between cameras if you miss them. The Return to Bloody Nights and Final Nights 4: Fates Entwined both go back to Fredbear's Family Diner in its earliest days: the first puts you on the night shift in 1983, weeks after the killings, with a generator that overheats, and the second splits its nights between the diner's founder in 1973 and an investigator in 2017, with point-and-click puzzles and multiple endings. Nikson's earlier The Joy of Creation: Halloween Edition is a single night on foot in Fazbear's Fright, hiding from a burned Springtrap and luring him away with sound.

Fredbear's Family Diner has become a fan-game setting of its own. Forgotten At Fredbear's casts you as a laid-off father on the diner's night shift in 1983, with cameras, a control panel and an override, and Those Nights at Fredbear's: New Destiny lets you walk the restaurant on foot, crouching and leaning round corners with a flashlight while Fredbear and Plushtrap roam. Five Nights at Chuck E. Cheese's: Rebooted moves the night shift to a real-world pizza chain in 1979, and Baby's Nightmare Circus is a short flashlight night against toothed nightmare versions of Sister Location's cast.

JOLLY and its sequels are for players who like managing systems. The first gives you building power, a generator with a reserve of its own and an elevator to keep pushing up; JOLLY 2 has you shock animatronics at the doors while fixing the leaking pipes behind you; JOLLY 3's two chapters add oxygen fans, a gas lever, a slow radar and a jammer that fries whatever reaches the door.

Two fan games bring in other worlds. SCP: The Endurance puts creatures from SCP - Containment Breach on the cameras of a Foundation facility, with ventilation to keep running and a flash to drive them back, and Oblitus Casa closes the Five Nights at Treasure Island series with a return to its haunted theme-park island by camera and candlelight.

One Night in 2D is the one to try first if you are not on Windows: it runs in the browser, and redraws the original nights side-on, so you walk your guard between the doors, lights and monitor yourself.

Start with Five Nights at Candy's if you want the closest thing to an official sequel, The Joy of Creation if you want 3D and variety, and One Night at Flumpty's if you want something stranger. None of these are official games; their characters and stories belong to their makers, and the FNAF characters to Scott Cawthon.

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