Five Nights at Freddy's 3

Maybe I'm looking at it from another perspective, but this game is heavily underrated and is genuinely not as bad as people say.
It is extremely inmersive, has a very creepy atmosphere, interesting gameplay mechanics, a great story with hidden details that add up to the creepiness of the game. Overall, great, right?
Well, here's the thing: This game is one of the least scary ones in the series. The only good jumpscares are the ones done by the phantoms (except for Phantom Puppet), but after that, the jumpscare that actually game-overs your game, Springtrap, is very poorly done as he basically just slides up to you like he's playing hide and seek and he just found you. While creative in it's formula, it's not executed amazingly well, however, still is greatly done in it's other features.
If this game was more scary, it could have genuinely been one of the best games in the franchise. Overall tho, it's just not that great, but still good. 6/10.

For me, FNAF 3 was when I realized this series had gone too far with the obscure lore and had forgone the basics of game design in favor of being Game Theory bait. Anyone praising this game for its story I think should seriously reconsider what it means for a game to have good story if its REQUIRED to watch a goddamn MatPat video on youtube to get even a morsel of coherent story out of it, because on a casual play-through the story tidbits are extremely obscure and hard to find, and the awful core gameplay does not compel me to seek them out.

That's the core problem with FNAF 3 and 4; the game itself took a backseat to the "lore." The mechanics in this game are honestly so shallow yet confusing that it boggles the mind. There's only 1 animatronic this time, but the means by which you defend yourself from him is unclear from the get-go, and there are no real changes that occur night to night, unlike previous games.

There's a mechanic in which you use laughing sounds of children to supposedly lure Springtrap away from your position, but its extremely unclear if and when this works, as Springtrap rarely seems to follow them, or is very delayed in following them. It's also required to regularly ventilate the facility (???) and restart several operating systems every hour or so. It doesn't seem to make any difference what order these are done in, and its unclear exactly how often these systems have to be rebooted, as there's no timer or general indication of when this has to be done.

Also, its unclear how failing to complete these tasks affects Springtrap's ability to reach you. He could be on the other side of the goddamn building, but then when one alarm goes off you could turn around to find him standing right in front of you mere seconds later. It's also laughable how everytime Springtrap appears outside your window, death seems impossible to avoid, yet he stands there several minutes sometimes before killing the player. Why even create that layer of separation between the fail state and the onset of the fail state? As soon as he's at the window, its basically just a game of chance if he's going to kill you or not before the night ends. There's no skill involved whatsoever. It's another aspect of this game just speaks to how shallow and undercooked the entire experience is.

Again, its just mind-boggling how half-baked and unfinished this game feels. The first 2 games were so much simpler in comparison, and it feels like the player actually had a say in whether you won or lost. FNAF 3 and 4 in comparison feel totally unbalanced and random. As an early FNAF fan, I can honestly tell you that the series stopped being great as soon as the "Give gifts, give life" minigame in FNAF 2 appeared, because it just opened the door to these games becoming more like an ARG than an actual game.

This is a shit stain on the FNAF franchise, and for sure the worst game made. It's just not scary, and sooo anoying, it's basically just a massive lore dump.

Genuinely brilliant story and stunning atmosphere. The tension of facing off against just one animatronic is breathtakingly intense, and the copious lore and story behind the game's already excellently written backstory is by far the best writing in the series. This was by far my favorite FNAF back in 2016 and still remains a horror experience I think has been unparalleled in its haunting simplicity.

If you didn't like the previous titles you wouldn't like this one either, but I thought this was fantastic, my only real compliant being that the phantoms started to get annoying and derivative from the core gameplay. Still, it's shocking how dark and poetic the story behind Springtrap and the missing children gets, and I think it deserves the fan following which has produced so much fantastic supplementary content. It's a formula that was overdone in FNAF2 and FNAF4 now perfected here.