A fair warning: This video regards a horror game, and it will feature some creepy sounds. It will
not contain any jumpscares, though. I promise. This is best experienced through headphones.
{What I Love!}
>>Announcer: Hello! And welcome! This educational video is designed to show you how a horror game
and its soundscape can intensify each other. Any other effects this video imparts are beyond the
liability of Fazbear Entertainment. Now you may be wondering: what is sound intensity?
How does it work? How can it keep me safe from any malfunctioning equipment in my
business establishment? Rest assured, the Five Nights at Freddy’s series can answer the first
two questions. Due to budgetary considerations and certainly not due to supernatural threats,
this video will only be covering FNaF 2, 3, 4, Sister Location, and Pizzeria Simulator.
But it should be noted that sound intensity occurs in all horror games, in fact it occurs
everywhere. There is no escape from—
—experience. And without further ado,
let’s hand it off to our guide, Scruffy, who needs to deliver a concise review of sound intensity in
the aforementioned games, if they wish to ward off the animatronics approaching the studio.
>>Scruffy: Wait, what? That wasn’t in rehears— >>Announcer: Remember to keep your eyes and
ears peeled, and from all of us at Fazbear Entertainment, good luck.
>>Scruffy: Wha… a-approaching the studio!? [distant animatronic sounds]
Ohhhkay! [thumps from air vent]
Uhh.. I-I’m Scruffy, and today, we gotta get right into it: “sound intensity.” It’s a very
subjective concept about how much tension a sound raises. It’s not as quantifiable as sound volume,
nor even as agreed upon as sound velocity, which is the rough amount of force with which something
is activated to create a sound. Though, generally speaking, louder, more forceful sounds are
more likely to be intense. But there are also cases where softer sounds can be intense,
for instance, someone yelling into a pillow. It’s also intense perhaps because the sound raises
questions. Where’s that yelling coming from? Who is yelling? Why is it muffled? Or, sounds
can become intense by association, which means each person can find different sounds intense.
But there are sometimes popular sounds like— [jack-in-the-box jingle repeats]
Y-yeah, like that. That a great deal of people have come to associate with rising tension for
a sudden... jump... And it’s precisely this sort of stress that can be exploited in a
horror game to make the player even more uneasy. So, let me share some examples that this handful of
FNAF games do well. These aren’t exclusive examples, they’re done well in other
horror games that I’ll want to talk about later, and there’s no story spoilers here,
but it’d be good to know the jist of the gameplay experience as we go through each game.
So, let’s begin with: FNaF 2: Unknown Drones
Sounds are easily intense when we don’t know what their source is. Whether we can’t locate
the sound, or we haven’t heard that kind of sound before. FNaF2 gets pretty intense already just
through pure gameplay, but in the slower moments of the game where you have little to no control,
a slew of untraceable sounds intensify the experience. If any animatronics are in your
office, primed to attack you, you get this TV static in your ears, where is that coming from?
If the Puppet’s music box isn’t kept wound, and it escapes and is set to attack you, you literally
hear the jack-in-the-box jingle anywhere you look, how is it doing that? You can even confirm the
location of one animatronic, Mangle, by the radio static it’s constantly emitting. Sure, but why
does it have to make such a garbled, incongruous sound? And then, personally the creepiest for
me are these interactive cutscenes between the nights of gameplay, where you are inexplicably
given the perspective of Freddy Fazbear, on stage with Bonnie and Chica. Visually, not
much is going on, but once we add the audio… [unsettling noises from FNaF2's cutscenes]
I don’t know what’s making that collection of sounds, I don’t know where they’re coming from,
I don’t know if they’re real or hallucinatory. While I’m playing, my guess is as good as yours.
That is effective sound intensity. Now, a related case of unknown sound is when we do
recognize the sound, but it’s indicating something that we haven’t or can’t immediately confirm.
This is why alarms are intense. When we hear an alarm before confirming that time has passed,
when we hear an alarm before we know that there’s smoke in a room, or that a car has been jacked,
or that a message is so important that all televisions need to broadcast it simultaneously.
Alarms earn their intensity by association, which is why this— [FNaF hallway alarm plays]
this alarm becomes intense in FNaF2, initially. It indicates that an animatronic is in the vents,
and you’d probably hear it before you confirm it... yep, there they are! We need to move on.
FNaF 3: Context is Everything So, this sequel generally scales
things back from FNaF2. You’re now only dealing with one real animatronic instead of…
at least ten. And though the sound design follows in the footsteps of FNaF2, I’d argue the intensity
is a bit scaled back as well. You have some alarm sounds that definitely raise questions the first
time you hear them. And, there’s another cool between-night interactive cutscene where you
explore an Atari-esque rendering of a pizzeria, once again playing as Freddy and the gang,
but with more incongruous audio of thunder and… strange, quiet rustling.
But again, I’d argue it’s not as immediately intense, this game’s a little more reserved
about creating auditory stress. And, there’s an interesting shared sound
effect between it and FNaF2. This is actually an example of de-intensifying a sound.
So, back in FNaF2 we have one animatronic, Balloon Boy, who will eventually try to get into your
office to sap your flashlight power. Pretty sure we’re safe for right now, but when he does move,
it comes with little utterances like these: [Balloon Boy voice]
And that’s really off-putting initially, this human voice is suddenly coming from
somewhere. That’s intense enough. Yet go over to FNaF3, and now these Balloon Boy sounds are
actually in your toolset to help you. You can play these sounds in a specific room,
and the animatronic you’re warding off, Springtrap, will be coaxed to go there,
thinking there’s someone in there. It’s one way to keep Springtrap away from your office. And by all
means, this was just a gamedev decision: it’s easier to reuse sounds from a previous title.
But, by recontextualizing them, these sounds are now no longer intense, they are positive feedback
for your actions, and we now know exactly where this sound is coming from and why. Now it would be
more intense not to hear them when you press this button, isn’t it funny how it works like that.
[sound of button failing] Ohh dear,
uhh, while I reboot this, let’s move on to: FNaF 4: Food Tastes Stronger When You’re Hungry
Strange subtitle, I know, but in the same way that taste is intensified
when we perceive a lack of food, hearing gets intensified when we perceive a lack of sound.
FNaF4 takes place in a child’s bedroom at night, and while it’s never silent in there,
it is remarkably quieter than the previous games in the series. There’s a fan in this room,
but unlike the previous games, it isn’t running. You just have some low, ominous droning,
some grandfather clock chimes in the distance, and the sound you’re told to listen for:
breathing.
Yes, if you hear breathing when you check a door, you are to close it to stop the animatronic from
attacking you right there. But breathing is quiet. The breathing that indicates an
animatronic is inches away rises only a little above the ambient noise of your room. And so,
in a playthrough of FNaF4, you have to parse sounds very granularly. Your ear is searching
for small differences in volume, which makes any difference in volume become more intense.
And, might I add, that’s only when you’re checking the doors: in other parts of the room there are
different, non-audial mechanisms for warding off animatronics. Not to mention this setting has
some of the lowest light so far in the series, so you clamor for visual information as well.
In my previous video about Five Nights at Freddy’s, I referred to this as
absence of information, when the player knows that something’s being withheld from them.
But it’s not exactly withheld information, it’s just faint information that takes focus to absorb
and corroborate into a plan. And with so many tasks to juggle, focusing on miniscule sounds
and details is intense, stressful even. [slight noise in the background]
Ooh, I heard that! We should move along, to: FNaF: Sister Location: Narrative Dissonance
First of all, this game is a smorgasbord of everything we’ve talked about so far.
You have weird unknown sounds all over the place, you have some sounds that would be intense
except that they’re given into your control, and thus you miss them when they aren’t present; and
you have one environment, the Ballora Gallery, in which you must traverse a pitch-black room while
listening out for a quiet ballerina music box, indicating that the animatronic Ballora is nearby.
So, with all that present, I wanted to touch on something a little different in this game since
it’s so focused on narrators. FNaF 4 was the first in the series with no vocal narrator, before that
Scott Cawthon himself was reading voice clips over the phone in every game. But in Sister Location,
you have two new AI narrators who guide you through the game, telling you your next tasks
and how to perform them. And perhaps their literal narration sound experiences some glitches here and
there. But a more postmodern way to intensify this narration is to add narrative dissonance,
where what is being narrated does not match what is happening in the story. There’s some
great exchanges where the HandUnit narrator will have you check for the animatronic Circus Baby
using a light. And even though she isn’t on her stage, the narrator believes she is,
and events continue. Rather than a specific sound, it’s language this time that makes you
aware that things aren’t as they seem, and thus the general arc of the game gets more intense.
There’s later a moment where Circus Baby will start talking to you, and she will say things
in direct conflict with the previous narrator’s instructions. Again, when the game raises more
and more unconfirmable questions this way, the whole experience becomes more intense.
This game was also significant in the series for having an original soundtrack, rather than using
stock music. And the game’s composer, Leon Riskin, worked some narrative dissonance into the music.
Most of the time you spend playing has no music, and some of the most dramatic or plot-heavy
moments will play some deep, moody themes. But the endpoints of each night are announced by
contrastingly comedic little jingles, with cheery elevator music at the beginning,
and a theme at the end of a night that sounds straight out of an 80’s VHS.
This game certainly flares its sense of humor when there’s room for a break from intensity,
but I find it fascinating that even this humor can raise more concerns than it satisfies.
There’s one great moment in the game where the literal sound of this dark comedy suddenly
spikes the moment’s intensity. You’re quietly making your way through the Ballora Gallery,
your ears are primed to the low noise floor, attentive for any distant music, when suddenly:
Announcer: "The HandUnit narrator chimes in at full volume, telling you to hurry up."
Scruffy: It’s not a jumpscare in the traditional sense, but it is a type of sound intensity that
gets highlighted in the next FNaF title: FNaF Pizzeria Simulator: Player Noise
Whew, we can do this. So, after you design your own pizzeria in this game, you have to survive in
it, performing some menial maintenance tasks like ordering pizzeria supplies and printing posters,
while any malicious animatronics inside track you down from the vents on either side of you.
A lot of variables affect your ability to make it through this, but one thing’s for sure:
you are loud, when you’re trying to be quiet. It’s kind of flipping the script of FNaF4:
now in addition to listening out for the once again miniscule sounds and voice clips that alert
you to nearby animatronics, you have to do tasks like printing, on the world’s noisiest printer,
and keep your office cool using a droning fan. Or, maybe you had your pizzeria
sponsored by a third-party company, and their ad blares on your computer all of a sudden.
Those sounds attract animatronics, and make it more difficult to hear the sounds you’re
really wary for. And even worse, there isn’t a clock-out time: you can only leave when all
these boisterous tasks are complete. So, this game especially feels like flirting with death:
it’s further exploiting how we perceive things when we’re instructed to stay quiet.
Every noise against that quiet state is intensified, especially the noises that are
our fault, that we can trace to ourselves. So even a sound that might not usually be that intense,
like appliances humming, starts to become a stressor in this context.
That’s the thing about sound intensity, it depends heavily on context, on how our minds
were previously attuned or instructed to perceive sounds, and how much we know about the source and
the meaning of the sound. But these were some ways the FNaF series flavored its gameplay
to make less complex scenarios still stressful, and perhaps to make jumpscares feel like they
top off a tense buildup, rather than come out of nowhere. And I have no doubt the FNaF devs
and growing community are not done with cooking up these intense experiences.
But, one last thing to note. There was a point starting at FNaF4 where the games approached
relying on those quiet sound cues to progress. It’s plausible to make it through the base games
without listening to sound cues, but some of the late-game challenges, especially the custom
night in FNaF: Sister Location, become essentially impossible, or at least, left very well up to luck,
without attentive listening. And that’s a problem if you don’t have access to sound, such as people
who are deaf or hard of hearing, or even just people without a speaker or headphone setup.
It’s just worth noting that, when working on a horror game, with an achievable win condition,
it behooves us to make sure it can be accomplished without the sound, just as FNaF4 can be
completed without the visuals. And… I think that’s everything,
yeah that’s it, that’s all I have to say, done, closing time! I’m safe! Whew... I hope this video
gave you some ideas about ways that sound intensity can work to your advantage if you
make games, or to your horror if you’re placed in the middle of them. I’d like to thank my
friend Wolfgang and DerEineSchwarzeRabe for helping out with this script.
I’d also like to thank my patrons on Patreon, who help make my videos a more sustainable process.
If you’d like to support my work directly and get perks like your credit here,
seeing videos early, a vote on what music I arrange, and more behind-the-scenes content,
you can visit my Patreon link in this video’s description. And with that, I’m Scruffy,
and thank you very much for watching.