Scott Cawthon Has the Lamest Reason to Delay Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location

If you’re one of those sorts who loves nothing more than delving into the twisty, intentionally misleading canon of FNAF and seeing things that aren’t there, I might have some bad news for you: Scott Cawthon feels guilty for making you scared, so he might have to postpone the new game, Sister Location.

Or, you know, it’s just lazy marketing. I’m going to go with the latter here.

Speaking on the game’s Steam page, Cawthon gave this update on the childhood-ruining Sister Location, which is supposed to be out on October 7th:

Hey guys, I wanted to post an announcement that this game might be postponed, and I’m not really sure when it would be released.

There are certain plot elements that are very dark, to the point where I sometimes feel sick. There would be no easy fix to this. I either release it Friday as it is, or I delay it by several months to completely rework the plot into something kid-friendly.

I’m unsure what I’m going to do. As always, thanks for your support.

It’s difficult to really react to this without sounding incredibly cynical and a bit world-weary. You see it a lot in modern video games: developers trying to drum up interest in a game by resorting to hyperbole. The thing is, most of FNAF’s fans are children, so they’re more likely to fall for what is possibly the most transparent PR stunt of the year.

But hey, if the guy needs to make a horror game less scary to suit the demographic that made his series big, who’s to blame him. Cawthon has a history of being quite scatty with release dates, sometimes dropping games at random or pulling them from sale because he’s unhappy with them. FNAF World was an RPG get in the same universe as the main series, but after lukewarm reviews, he took it off Steam – it can still be found on GameJolt.

I just realised something: if this is a PR stunt, I have fallen into his trap by posting the first thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s on Cultured Vultures in about two years. Well played, Cawthon. Well played. On the other hand, if the game is genuinely too much to handle, even more so than Agony, I will buy it.

Wait. Goddamn it.