Five Nights at Freddy’s now has Vtubers?

Here’s how popular Twitch streamer Vtuber Filian played Five Nights at Freddy’s with her chat being the player and she and her friends being the “animatronics”.

Filian Combines Five Nights at Freddy’s with VRChat and her Viewers

There are probably few gamers who have not heard of the Five Nights at Freddy’s (or simply FNaF) franchise. For a decade now, the indie horror game series has released multiple titles expanding on its otherwise relatively simple beginnings. The franchise has even spawned a few novels and a film (of dubious quality).

While some of the newer releases in the series feature more complex horror survival elements, the initial couple of titles had very simple gameplay. The player, who takes the role of a security guard in the eponymous fictional pizzeria, sits in an office and controls various cameras and doors in an attempt to ward off the haunted animatronics that roam at night.

This simplicity in gameplay, alongside the ton of hidden lore and unique enemy designs, made the Five Nights at Freddy’s explode in popularity. The games have a huge following even today and have become super recognizable. Fans have even replicated the game in various other forms of media and games, including VRChat.

Popular Vtuber and Twitch streamer Filian recently found a new way to interact with her viewers and let them play what is essentially a version of FNaF in VRChat. It’s rare to see viewers being able to interact so actively in a streamer’s game. Once more, the whole stream was quite interesting from a technical standpoint of how it was actually set up. So let’s take a closer look at how Filian and friends brought a thematically spooky and very interactive stream to fans.

How Did This Actually Work?

In a recent stream, the popular streamer invited three of her friends – LaynaLazar, Chibidoki, and Fefe, all popular Vtubers in their own right. The four of them played a special map in VRChat, which was very closely inspired by the original Five Nights at Freddy’s pizzeria. That being said, this time the “game” was called Five Nights at Filly’s, a pun on both the original game and the streamer’s name.

While this in itself isn’t something new (there are many VRChat worlds inspired or even directly copied from FNaF’s maps), the trick here is that the viewers also participated and played as the guard. The four streamers were the “animatronics” of the game, essentially playing as themselves, but crazy and unhinged due to some curse.

Meanwhile, the viewers could move to different cameras and close doors thanks to a special Twitch extension on the stream itself. This allowed individual viewers to vote on which camera to switch to or what door to close/open. It required a lot of coordination from the chatters to be able to quickly and concisely switch between cameras, but it seems they all shared a few brain cells and managed well. The stream even came with five separate nights, with the start of each level starting with a voice message that gave a bit of story.  

While the viewers died several times (a lot of which to Layna, pictured above), they managed to beat the game in less than two hours. The map and whole setup were made possible thanks to Reality, a Japanese-language smartphone application by the studio REALITY Co., Ltd. that allows viewing VTuber-oriented live streams, chatting, and reactions.

All in all, it was quite an interesting and novel way for fans to interact with streamers in a thematic for the season way.