It's 5 a.m., and you're running out of power. The stingy corporate higher ups aren't willing to give you the tools you need, so you have to take care of everything yourself. That means frantically flipping between camera feeds, listening for footsteps near the doors on either side of you, and turning the lights off as soon as they're not necessary. All it takes is one second of hesitation and it could all be over. But you're on it this time, keeping all hostile parties in your sights. Except as you're looking to the right, you hear something from the left. And before you can even react– AAAAH! Stupid Foxy.
For all the guff it gets about jump scares, the Five Nights at Freddy's series knows how to build a constant sense of tension and dread. That core is still there in Five Nights At Freddy's: Help Wanted, a sort of remaster of the original three games with added mini-games based on later titles. Help Wanted took the murderous animatronics to VR, and upped the thrill by doing so. Now Help Wanted has a Nintendo Switch port. It's great to have the games all in one place on a handheld, but the experience doesn't entirely translate from its VR roots.
Face-To-Face With Freddy
The obvious appeal of having FNAF in VR is that now Freddy and the gang are coming for you. Not the TV screen several feet away, not your tiny little phone screen. Those jump scares get up close and personal. Again, though, it's not all about the gimmick. Help Wanted adds two things that help elevate the FNAF experience: mini-games and a visual upgrade.
The mini-games build upon the more exciting parts of Sister Location. One set has you repairing the classic animatronics. You have to physically reach out to Bonnie's face, take out his eyeballs, and then remove his faceplate. Touch anywhere else on the body, or take the eyes out in the wrong order, and you get a jump scare. Like the original game, it can get both tense and frustrating when the novelty of the jump scare wears off. At its best, there's the looming threat of urgency even as you need to move precisely. At its worst, the physics engine can send spare parts flying and trigger an unfair game over. The other mini-game set has you repairing air vents as Mangle or Ennard creep up to you. This fares better at keeping the tension without feeling cheap thanks to the claustrophobic setting and less punishing tasks.
The visuals do a wonderful job at retaining the cheap, unsettling feeling of Fazbear's Pizza while still taking advantage of the new hardware. The original FNAF trilogy used mostly static images as it was the product of a lone developer on a tight budget. In some ways, this helped the horror. Seeing the camera feed glitch and Chica suddenly appear was very in line with the atmosphere. But now the animatronics move. Developer Steel Wool deserves praise for how restrained they were in implementing this. For the most part, the animatronics only move to enter a camera frame or stroll up to a door. As such, the addition of animation doesn't take away from the scare of seeing Bonnie suddenly come up on you. It does, however, help gameplay just a bit by giving you a brief moment to react.
Creepy Console Controls
The elevator pitch of "Five Nights at Freddy's but it's VR and you're there" is fantastic. With the execution being as stellar as it is, Help Wanted's Steam page is flooded with rave reviews. When the formula is ported to console, however, the game is like Mangle – it doesn't live up to its purpose, bit still gets the job done.
The biggest issue with the Switch port is the new control scheme. The VR version affixes the camera to your visor. Again, the idea is that you're "really" there. In the original FNAF, for instance, you look left to see one door and right to see the other. The VR version supports motion controls, so you push buttons to switch cameras and close doors. In the Switch version you get two replacement options. One is a fixed camera; a press of L 0r R quickly pans left and right. The arrow buttons or right stick flip between camera buttons, and you use X to activate lights/doors. The other option is a free look camera. The button inputs remain the same here, but you have the ability to take in the whole space and find secret lore (because of course there's secret lore).
Neither control scheme lives up to the VR one. The locked camera is the most efficient as it allows you to quickly pan in time to catch would-be attackers. But some of the button choices, like B to confirm, are odd for Switch and take getting used to. The free look is essential for grabbing secrets, but isn't precise enough. This is especially frustrating for the mini-games. Imagine needing to grab one specific power cell for Foxy, but the pointer won't hone in on it. Instead, you end up flinging all the power cells in the drawer at Foxy. Have fun with your 24th unearned jump scare. The controls aren't game-breaking, and you can learn to work around them. It's just very clear that you're playing a port of something meant for VR.
As A Fan
The gameplay alone makes Help Wanted worth it for fans of FNAF. Revisiting the original trilogy reveals that, for the most part, it does hold up. The "hard mode" is still too unforgiving, but Help Wanted applies an interesting framing device to make it worth at least trying. The mini-games also offer a nice glimpse at what could be the future of the series.
Lore-wise... it's a mixed bag. The intro maintains a fun, self-aware tone. Apparently Help Wanted is a Fazbear Entertainment product. The company wants to erase all the "rumors" of grisly events at its restaurants. To do this, they're embracing the horror stories by making a game about them. It's a neat way to explain the remastered old games, and offer a story beyond that of the Afton family. (SPOILERS) Except... not really. In true FNAF fashion, there are secret tapes the player can uncover. Getting them all and taking certain actions reveals a secret story behind the game's creation. This brings back William Afton, good ol' Springtrap, again. At this point, secret lore is part of the FNAF package. But do we really need to revive Afton after his zombified corpse was burned and sent to Hell? Even for a game about haunted animatronics, the story is getting to be too much at this point. Let Afton die.
If you skip the lore and take some time to get used to the controls, however, Five Nights At Freddy's: Help Wanted is the best way to experience the series on Switch. The core gameplay is still as tense as it was when everyone on Youtube was playing it, and the thrills are improved by new visuals. $29.99 might be a bit much to ask without VR, so it's probably most suited for old fans looking to see what Freddy is up to these days.