So, shouldn't they be renamed as Five Nights at Freddy's Twice?
People have fun playing visual novels and narrative adventure games. It sounds like this is something similar, no?
I guess to me, the work isn't really worth the payoff, especially since I don't consider jumpscares to actually be 'scary'.
With something like a visual novel or narrative adventure game, you're constantly being fed story crumbs to get you to your next story beat.
For FNAF, it's "Survive like 10 minutes without getting jumpscared and you get a 2 minute long minigame/cutscene that delves into the lore, and if you get jumpscared even once, you have to start all over again."
I think, as crazy as this may sound, that FNAF sans the jumpscares would be actually interesting, with reimagining the horror in a different direction, but it's just "Let's make loud noise so funny youtube personality screams loud." Even Security Breach, a game which does something
entirely new for the franchise falls back on the jumpscares, and I say they're probably some of the worst in the series to date, they're just not scary. Loud noise with character shaking in your face doesn't make it any scarier.
I
will say that the 1st game in the series actually did the jumpscares somewhat well, since the atmosphere actually felt oppressive and unsettling, and the gen 1 designs were pretty eerie, giving off that nostalgic fear, but every game after that just....
no, especially the 3rd game, which even the fanbase itself admits had lame-ass jumpscares due to how non-threatening they were.