Five Nights at Freddy's 4 (or FNAF4) is one of the scariest horror games ever made. By stripping down the Five Nights at Freddy's formula to its bare bones and putting you in the shoes of a child searching their bedroom for monsters, it creates a terrifying atmosphere, gripping gameplay, and an incredibly immersive experience that's like nothing else. The Five Nights at Freddy's franchise is as much an internet phenomenon as it is a series of games. In each game, you take control of a protagonist who is tasked with surviving a long night in a spooky establishment. For the first several games, you play as a security guard who watches over a series of monitors, By observing a network of security cameras on these monitors, you keep tabs on a set of animatronic horrors who are out to murder you - or worse. Fail to track them for a few seconds and they'll suddenly appear right in your face with a jumpscare, ending your night. Five Nights at Freddy's 4 iterates on this formula by removing all of the unnecessary fluff. Instead of being a grown adult separated from the monsters by screens and technology, in FNAF 4, you're a little kid in your bedroom with a flashlight. The gameplay remains similar: you use your flashlight to look out for a number of animatronic monsters, each taking a more nightmarish appearance than in the previous games. Instead of looking at camera feeds, you have to manually check each of the game's areas. You move between the doors to your bedroom, your closet, and your bed, with the flashlight providing the bulk of the illumination as you poke around. FNAF 4 makes heavy use of sound cues to both scare you and inform you of the position of the monsters. In one particularly memorable case, checking the hallways outside of your room makes heavy use of sound cues. If a monster is far, lifting up your light will scare it away. If it's close, however, lifting up your light will trigger it to attack, ending your night. You'll have to open the door and listen to hear the monster's breathing in order to determine whether it's safe to use your flashlight. Like the other games, FNAF 4 makes heavy use of minigames in between nights to tell the game's story. FNAF 4 features an additional minigame that appears between all of the nights. Successfully navigating the challenges presented in this game and luring the monster to the X will give you a big time bonus for the next night, allowing you to start at 1 or 2 AM. If you have to restart the night, however, this bonus will go away. The atmosphere, visuals, and gameplay of FNAF 4 are arguably the best in the series. Unfortunately, FNAF 4 was released at a point where gaming media was somewhat oversaturated with FNAF content. The success of the first few games was no doubt due to the symbiotic relationship between the games themselves and the host of content creators who recorded themselves playing them, so when FNAF 4 came out, people were a bit tired of the series as a whole. Now that it's had time to breathe, however, it's clear that FNAF 4 is a wonderful horror game in its own right, with some of the spookiest gameplay around.