Five Nights At Freddy's World Is Back And There Have Been Some Very Important Changes

Scott Cawthon made waves with the original Five Nights at Freddy's games. They were huge blockbuster sellers that came out of nowhere, made a ton of money thanks to the viral spread on YouTube and spawned multiple sequels. Cawthon kind of messed up with the Five Nights at Freddy's RPG he recently released, but he went back to the drawing board and decided to make some very important changes to the game.

PC Gamer did a quick write-up on the re-emergence of Five Nights at Freddy's World where the game is currently available... for free. Scott Cawthon pulled the game off of Steam just a few days after he launched it, citing that the quality was not up to par and taking the criticisms very seriously that the community had put forward.

You can download the game right now from over on GameJolt, for free. It's a 237MB file and doesn't take long to download. Once it finishes you can run the exe file straight away and it will take you into the game with a warning message about bright flashing lights.

The complaints about the original release of Five Nights at Freddy's World were more or less consistent about a couple of key features, some of which that Cawthon addressed and others that he did not. For instance, the number one complaint about the game was that there were no descriptions for the attacks. This meant that you had to fumble around and discover what each attack did and whether or not it was something that was effective based on trial and error. It's an absolutely terrible way of trying to play an RPG, especially where turn-based counter-strategies make up for the brunt of the combat. If you don't understand what your attacks are then how can you mount an effective counter?

Cawthon has added light descriptions for each attack, defense move, buff and status effect in the game. This makes it easier to understand what each move does that the characters can utilize during combat. The descriptions don't end with just the attacks. There are also item descriptions as well when you visit the NPC vendors scattered through the overworld of Five Nights at Freddy's World.

And speaking of the overworld... in the original release of the game the overworld was an 8-bit, digitized world with an old arcade-style, scanline screen filter over it. It looked like something from off the Commodore 64.

In the updated release of the game, the 8-bit overworld has been replaced with a full 3D backdrop for each location. It definitely matches up better with the 3D combat sequences where the characters have highly detailed models on display.

Unfortunately two of the biggest problems from the original release of Five Nights at Freddy's World are still present. First up, there are still very long load times between switching between menus. I'm not sure why the load times are so long between menus and Cawthon doesn't say if this will be addressed in a future update. Also, pressing the “Esc” key automatically exits the game. Anyone used to pressing Escape to exit a menu will be in for a rude awakening when they press the key and forget to save it and find themselves kicked out.

But for a game that's free-to-play, it's not like you're really going to lose anything by grabbing a free copy off of GameJolt. Five Nights at Freddy's World is only a quarter of a gig big and the only thing you'll lose is a little bit of bandwidth and hard drive space.