Five Nights at Freddy's came out on 8 August 2014 as a Windows game made by one developer, Scott Cawthon, about a night guard who can only watch cameras and close two doors.1 This Halloween the same pizzeria is a Fortnite map: Epic's Fortnitemares 2026 event, live since 1 October, put Freddy, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy in the shop as skins and the animatronics in a survival mode.2
Between those two dates the series picked up two Universal films, a VR spin-off, a shelf of Scholastic paperbacks and a career-making YouTube series. Each of the 12 rankings below asks about one of those places.
Five Nights at Freddy's looks strongest wherever a list rewards reach, and weakest wherever it rewards craft: the security office conquered cinemas and bookshops while critics kept marking it down.
Five Nights at Freddy's vs Resident Evil 4: the best horror game of all time
The broadest question in the set lists 53 horror games, and Five Nights at Freddy's shares it with Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2, P.T. and Bloodborne.
Cawthon's game has almost nothing those rivals have. There is no walking, no inventory and no combat. The player sits in an office, flips through cameras and watches a power meter drain.
That minimalism is the case for it. Resident Evil 4 changed how action games put the camera over a shoulder, while Five Nights at Freddy's changed who could make a horror hit: one person, a cheap engine and a good idea about dread.
Fans of Resident Evil 4 will say a horror game should also be a good game to play for twenty hours. Few people play Five Nights at Freddy's for twenty hours.
Alien: Isolation and the cheapest scare in horror
"Scariest" is a narrower question than "best", and it suits Five Nights at Freddy's better than almost any other ranking here. The jump scare is the whole design.
Alien: Isolation builds fear over hours, with one creature that learns where the player hides. Five Nights at Freddy's builds it in seconds: a face fills the screen, a scream plays, the night resets to 12 AM.
Critics have called the second approach cheap. Players who first met Freddy in 2014 remember it as the game that made them throw a phone across a room, and that memory is what this ranking measures.
Silent Hill, Resident Evil and the youngest franchise on the list
Of the 30 series in this franchise ranking, Five Nights at Freddy's arrived last. Resident Evil dates from 1996 and Silent Hill from 1999.
Scale favours the old guard. Capcom counted 213 million Resident Evil units sold worldwide as of 30 June 2026.3 Konami's Silent Hill owns the genre's reputation for psychological horror.
Speed favours Freddy. Guinness World Records credits Five Nights at Freddy's with the most videogame sequels released in a year: three, ending with the fourth game on 23 July 2015.4
Silent Hill's defenders would point out that its best entry still sets the standard after 25 years. Cawthon's series has never had a single game critics treat that way.
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 vs Security Breach: one series, two eras
This is the ranking where every option belongs to Five Nights at Freddy's, so the question becomes which version of the series people prefer.
The early games are static. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 arrived on 11 November 2014, three months after the original, and took the doors away, leaving a mask and a music box.
Security Breach, released on 16 December 2021 by Steel Wool Studios, is the opposite: a free-roaming 3D game in a shopping-mall Pizzaplex. Metacritic scored it 64.5
Between them sit Sister Location, Ultimate Custom Night, two VR games and Secret of the Mimic from June 2025. Fans of the first era argue the series lost its fear when it gave the player legs.
Survival horror without running
Survival horror usually means scarce ammunition, locked doors and a long walk through a hostile place. Five Nights at Freddy's keeps only the scarcity.
The resource is electricity. Every door closed and every camera checked drains the power meter, and at zero the lights go out and Freddy plays a tune before he arrives.
Next to The Last of Us or Resident Evil 2, that is a thin claim to the genre. Purists can fairly say the office belongs on a different list.
Amnesia vs Five Nights at Freddy's: two indie templates
Indie horror is the category Five Nights at Freddy's helped define, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent shaped it four years earlier.
Frictional Games released Amnesia in 2010 and taught a generation of small studios to take the weapons away. Cawthon took away movement as well, and proved that a solo developer could fill YouTube with a single mechanic.
Its descendants are on the same list: Iron Lung, Buckshot Roulette and The Mortuary Assistant all trap the player in one small space. Amnesia's case is that it came first and is still the better game to play alone with headphones.
Five Nights at Freddy's among Pokémon GO and Candy Crush
Phones are where much of the original audience found the series. The Android version followed on 27 August 2014 and iOS on 11 September, weeks after the PC release.1
The company here is enormous. Pokémon GO, Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans and Minecraft are among the most-played games ever released on any platform.
No other game in that field is pure horror, and Five Nights at Freddy's has a claim of fit: tapping between cameras on a phone in a dark bedroom suited it.
Get Out vs Five Nights at Freddy's: Blumhouse's biggest grosser
Blumhouse's catalogue includes Get Out, The Invisible Man, Insidious and the 2018 Halloween, and the 2023 Five Nights at Freddy's film is its highest-grossing release.
The Numbers records an $80.0 million domestic opening and $298.3 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, even though Universal put the film on Peacock the same day it reached cinemas.6
Get Out has the stronger claim on quality: Jordan Peele's debut took an Academy Award for its screenplay. Money is the only column where the animatronics lead Blumhouse's history.
Transformers vs Five Nights at Freddy's 2: hits critics hated
Both films appear in the least flattering ranking of the set. It collects movies that reviewers dismissed and audiences paid for anyway.
The sequel had the harsher reception. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opened on 5 December 2025 with a Metacritic score of 24, down from the first film's 33.5 It still grossed $239.6 million worldwide on a $51 million budget.7
The benchmark is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which made $836.5 million in 2009 on a $210 million budget despite brutal reviews.8 Batman v Superman, Venom and Fifty Shades of Grey are on the same list.
Fans would say the films were made for them, not for critics, and the receipts back that up.
Help Wanted: the format Freddy was built for
Virtual reality suits Five Nights at Freddy's unusually well. The original game already locked the player in one spot and asked them to look around, which is exactly what a VR headset does.
Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted, co-developed by Cawthon and Steel Wool and released on 28 May 2019, rebuilt the classic nights as VR minigames. Its PlayStation 4 version scored 80 on Metacritic, 16 points above Security Breach.5 A sequel, Help Wanted 2, followed on 14 December 2023.
The competition is serious: Resident Evil 7 in VR, Half-Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Half-Life: Alyx is the stronger game overall, but few VR horror titles are as purely about the jump scare.
Goosebumps vs Fazbear Frights: the bookshelf
Five Nights at Freddy's is also a Scholastic book line. The Silver Eyes trilogy ran from 2015 to 2018, Fazbear Frights added 12 volumes of short stories, and Tales from the Pizzaplex added eight more.
That puts the series in the same aisle as Goosebumps, which R.L. Stine started for Scholastic in 1992, and alongside Fear Street, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Cirque du Freak.
Goosebumps has three decades of readers who grew up and passed the books on. Fazbear Frights has a younger and narrower audience: children who knew the game, or its YouTube playthroughs, before they opened the book.
Markiplier's Five Nights at Freddy's series
The final ranking is about a YouTuber who played it on camera. Markiplier's channel lists Five Nights at Freddy's next to Unus Annus, A Heist with Markiplier and his Iron Lung project.
His Five Nights at Freddy's videos were among the reasons the game spread so quickly in 2014. Viewers watched him scream at the jump scares, and many bought the game to try it themselves.
Unus Annus, the year-long channel he ran with Ethan Nestor, is the rival here: a deliberate experiment that deleted itself on schedule. The Freddy videos are older and simpler, and they are the reason many players first heard the name Freddy Fazbear.
The office that outgrew its critics
Across these 12 lists the security office does best where the measure is audience: phones, paperbacks, YouTube, Blumhouse's ledger. It does worst where the measure is design, next to Resident Evil 4 or The Last of Us. Each of those lists is settled in two-option matchups; there is a short explainer on how head-to-head voting builds a full ranking.
Got a horror series that should face the same twelve rooms? Make its ranking and find out how many nights it lasts.
More rankings, more angles
- Resident Evil vs Silent Hill: Which Is Scarier? 14 Lists — Capcom's zombies against Konami's fog
- Is Resident Evil the Best Horror Franchise? 14 Fan Rankings — Capcom's series at 30
- Where Does Markiplier Rank Among the Greatest YouTubers? 12 Lists — the YouTuber whose Freddy videos spread the game
Sources
- Wikipedia — List of Five Nights at Freddy's media (release dates of the games, mobile ports, Help Wanted, Security Breach, Secret of the Mimic; the Silver Eyes, Fazbear Frights and Tales from the Pizzaplex books): en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-31)
- Beebom — Five Nights at Freddy's Fortnite collab announced for Fortnitemares, 1 October 2026: beebom.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Capcom — Game series sales, Resident Evil cumulative units as of 30 June 2026: capcom.co.jp (checked 2026-10-31)
- Guinness World Records — Most videogame sequels released in a year: guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- Wikipedia — Five Nights at Freddy's (Metacritic scores for Security Breach, Help Wanted and both films; Blumhouse's highest-grossing film): en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-31)
- The Numbers — Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) box office and budget: the-numbers.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- The Numbers — Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025) box office and budget: the-numbers.com (checked 2026-10-31)
- The Numbers — Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen box office and budget: the-numbers.com (checked 2026-10-31)