FNAF Fan Games: The Best Free Five Nights Fan Games

Fan games are as old as Five Nights at Freddy's. 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. A handful built followings in the tens of thousands and their own casts. These are the ones worth playing, all free on PC.

Five Nights at Candy's is the fan series to start with. 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. The first game's page also links the maker's own remaster.

The Joy of Creation: Story Mode is the biggest departure. It is in full 3D, needs a decent PC, and splits one night into five levels: a child's bedroom 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. Its maker, Nikson, started with Those Nights at Rachel's, a 3D night shift in which you turn around the office, lean out, hide and run to a second room while a restaurant's rabbit and dog animatronics look for you. His 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. The Glitched Attraction takes the 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.

JR's, named after the restaurant in Pizzeria Simulator's Midnight Motorist minigame, turns the night guard into a paranormal investigator. Each night a few of a closed restaurant's old animatronics are haunted, and you watch the cameras for the one that flickers a feed, turns it or goes missing, while keeping the rest stable; between nights you can wander The Barrens, a limbo between life and death. Ultra Custom Night is for players who have finished Ultimate Custom Night: you pick from a roster of more than 870 characters from the series and its fan games, set each from 0 to 20, and juggle doors, vents, ducts, cameras, a generator, a heater and A/C at once.

If you would rather relive the official story, several 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 puts you on the night shift at Fredbear's Family Diner in 1983, weeks after the killings, with a generator that overheats. JeliLiam's Final Nights series runs through three games here: in the second you take the burnt animatronics from the Fredbear's fire home to repair them and watch them on homemade cameras at night; the third plays out a brain-damaged patient's nightmares with a flashlight and multiple endings; and the fourth splits its nights between the diner's founder in 1973 and an investigator in 2017, with point-and-click puzzles.

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 to Remember, a 2024 remake of one of the first fan games set there, hires you as night watchman after the diner reopens with new animatronics. Five Nights at Chuck E. Cheese's: Rebooted moves the night shift to a real-world pizza chain in 1979.

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. Five Nights at Friedrich's has a similar mix of jokes and tension: a cartoon bear and his German band try to get into your purple office, and you cook pizzas, fire lasers and watch the heat over six nights; it also runs on Mac and Linux.

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. Post-Shift 2 is in the same vein and harder: split into two downloads, it has you keep attention, oxygen and condition meters up in a toy company's warehouse while rebuilt animatronics come through the vents and down the aisles. The Return to Freddy's: Winter Wonderland gives you a spotlight, a mascot head that costs oxygen, a generator that breaks down and a music box to keep wound.

Several newer fan games rebuild the first game's night with modern tools. Next Week at Freddy's, in Unreal Engine 5, enlarges the map, gives each animatronic its own way to reach you and puts a control panel of levers behind your chair. Creepy Nights at Freddy's rebuilds the original pizzeria in 3D for free roam, with the doors, lights and power intact. Fazbear Nights, also in Unreal Engine 5, gives the guard of a new Freddy Fazbear's cameras, doors and limited power but lets you leave the office and roam, with a custom night and post-game challenges. Freddy's: Reanimated redesigns the cast and the map and makes the nights harder. Fazbear Entertainment: Storage keeps the classic camera play but sets it among the broken toy animatronics of FNAF 2, between the first and third games. A Bite at Freddy's, a short Godot fan game on itch.io, keeps the cameras, the door and the power load but gives you a job at Freddy Fazbear's Grill: keep the Freddy Fast-Food Delivery machine sending orders from the kitchen while you watch what moves on ten cameras.

A few change who you are or who is coming. Chica's Party World: REBAKED, the official remake of a 2018 fan game, makes you a reactivated security robot guarding a party restaurant before its renovation, watching cameras and finishing tasks while things are not what they seem. In Bondee's Barnyard: Safety Violation you are inside a cow animatronic with a missing child, fending off the farm-themed cast while the guard's camera must never see you move. The TubbyLand Archives - ACT 1 swaps Freddy's band for Teletubby-like characters in a reopening activity centre, watched on cameras with no door to hide behind. SCP: The Endurance puts creatures from SCP - Containment Breach on the cameras of a Foundation facility, and Oblitus Casa closes the Five Nights at Treasure Island series with a return to its haunted theme-park island by camera and candlelight. Baby's Nightmare Circus is a short flashlight night against toothed nightmare versions of Sister Location's cast.

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. One Night as Freddy, a game jam entry by Uprank, also plays in the browser and makes you Freddy, creeping toward the guard's office past his cameras.

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, One Night at Flumpty's if you want something stranger, and JR's or Ultra Custom Night if you already know the formula well.

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