FNAF: Ultimate Custom Night is a different sort of Five Nights at Freddy’s game where you can choose to survive against a whopping total of 50 threats from across the first 6 games.  Each of these can be set to a max level of 20 for the greatest challenge.  Although UCN can initially look overwhelming to a newcomer, I soon found the game to be quite fun and addicting as I slowly added more and more animatronics to see just how big of a high score I could earn.  (As of writing this, 8400 is the best I could get out of a total of 10000).

Combining the features of past FNAF games, there are two doors and two vents where dangers lurk, plus animatronics that like to roam the air ducts.  To survive, you’ll need to conserve power (the power generator helps a lot with slowing down power consumption), close the correct doors and vents, shine your flashlight on a few threats, and wear the Freddy mask to fool a few of your animatronic visitors.  Depending on who is active, you may also need to keep the office cool and make sure the noise level stays down.  This all can be rather overwhelming to learn early on, but if you just add a few animatronics at a time and learn how they work, it’s really not too bad.  Oh, and each hour of the 6-hour night is 45 seconds, meaning you’ll have to survive for 4 minutes and 30 seconds in total.

You’d think it would be difficult to learn how to survive against 50 animatronics, but I learned the strategies surrounding all of them fairly quickly.  And it helps that the methods for dealing with many of them overlap.  For example, 3 can be soothed using the global music box, and 6 can be kept at bay using the heater.  Plus, many are merely distractions that can’t actually kill you, like Helpy blowing an air horn in your face and Phone Guy’s calls.  Though there are a few special cases with very unique mechanics.  For example, Toy Freddy can be found playing a FNAF-style game of his own in another office, and you must shut the corresponding door to prevent him from losing to Mr. Hugs.  And, as he himself will tell you, if he gets jumpscared, you’ll get jumpscared.  Clearly, he’s a bit of a sore loser.

While I enjoyed this game far more than I expected, one thing about UCN that can be a tad annoying is the fact that it’s partially luck-based.  First off, DD is one character who may appear at random, and after singing a little song, she’ll summon a random character, either from the roster or from her own secret collection.  Once you get the hang of how the game works, her antics won’t usually ruin your run, but she was pretty annoying when I first started playing.  Also, some characters can behave in ways that can give you a hard time if you’re unlucky.  After blocking Mr. Hugs once, sometimes that will be sufficient to keep Toy Freddy happy for the rest of the night.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes Rockstar Bonnie will appear and make you search through the cameras for his guitar, more often than not ruining whatever strategy you had working up until that point.  Sometimes, he’ll never show up.  And the audio lure only works on Nedd Bear 50% of the time, but sometimes, even if you think you’re being diligent with the heater, he or Orville will still find their way to your office.  (Other times, they’ll get hopelessly stuck in the air duct’s dead end and never figure out where you are.)

Another thing that can help with your efforts are powerups and coins.  Powerups can repel DD or allow you to start the night with an advantage, such as a cooler temperature, a little more power, or a few coins.  And coins can be used to buy a Death Coin and banish select animatronics for the rest of the night.  Coins are earned whenever an animatronic is blocked by a closed door or vent, by hovering over them in the cameras, or by taking a chance and asking Rockstar Foxy for help (though he may just plain murder you if his level is high enough).  On the flipside, coins can also be required to buy plushies of three animatronics, and if you don’t get their respective toy in time, death is inevitable.  Yikes!

In case the thrill of earning an ever increasing high score isn’t enough to motivate you, you also earn these rather humorous anime-style cutscenes every 700 points.  (By cutscenes, I mean still images that pan, while dialogue plays over them.)  One of these is Bear of Vengeance, chronicling the Bear’s efforts to defeat the dastardly Fox (fun fact: the Japanese voice acting doesn’t match the subtitles) and Toy Chica: The High School Years.  In the case of that one, the moral of the story is…just don’t date Toy Chica, okay?  Certain point thresholds also earn you different offices just to change the aesthetic.  There are also Challenges, which include a themed handful of animatronics to deal with, such as Bears Attack, which focuses on the many Freddies throughout the series (and a few non-Freddy bears).

As complicated as UCN is, the game is certainly easier if you know how things work.  A “pro tip” for you guys, many animatronics cannot kill you if you are looking at the office.  Nightmare, for example, can stand at the right door, staring into your soul, as long as he darn well pleases, but as long as you don’t flip the camera up, there’s nothing he can do.  Of course, you will need to reset the ventilation before you black out, but my point is: being surrounded by a bunch of threats peering into your office doesn’t have to be game over.  Don’t panic…but do close the left door and top vent whenever you look at the cameras if you don’t want Freddy, Mangle, and Withered Chica sneaking in.  With this simple strategy, combined with remembering to swap the positions of the wet floor sign roughly every 15 seconds for Rockstar Chica, there are many animatronics you never even need to check on, making your odds of survival far higher.  (At the very least, this strategy did help me to get 8400 points.)  And if you’re still feeling overwhelmed, just remember that, over time, you’ll naturally develop quick reflexes, and soon rough, you’ll be reacting to threats without even needing to think about it.  (I’m looking at you, Scraptrap, you speedy goober!)

Now, there are some very skilled people out there who have beaten 50/20 mode, and I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them.  The biggest issue is, well, I’m simply not skilled enough.  The second issue stems from the fact (or excuse?) that I played this game on console, and many people say the console version is more difficult (not impossible, just more difficult) because it’s far easier to accurately select the correct cameras and whatnot with a mouse than it is with a control stick.  And when 50 monstrosities are trying to break your door down, you can’t afford to waste any time!  Fortunately, you can more easily peruse the menu featuring the heater, AC, and other tools by holding the left trigger button, and the right trigger button makes flipping through the cameras much more convenient for us console users.

Ultimate Custom Night is actually free on Steam and seems like the superior version of the game, as it was originally made for PC, though I’m perfectly happy with my copy on the PS4.  The game is also $7.99 for PS4 and Switch users and $2.99 for mobile.