Five nights at Freddy’s is a horror game in which the player is trapped in the security office of a pizzeria while animatronic creatures attempt to kill them. The horror feeling is built out of two concepts, absence of action and absence of information.
The absence of information refers to the fact that the animatronic creatures move when the player is not looking at them, and so the player must rely on clues as to their whereabouts. The player has access to some obvious visual clues such as the CCTV system, but a lot of the information is subtilely delivered to the player through the audio of the game. The audio is a more complicated source of information as some audio helps you and some deceives you, this adds to unsettling nightmare like sense of not knowing.
Within the game sound there is advantageous audio, this is the audio that helps the player with their goal of survival. These sounds do not reveal themselves straight away, when the player begins the game the sounds present themselves as chaotic. As more time is spent in the game, the player gains an understanding of the auditory patterns and their listening transitions from casual to semantic, deducing clues from the patterns. An example of this is the sound of pots and pans, at first this sound seems like an element of ambience, put in the game to induce panic in the player. However as the player interacts with the game more they will find that this sound becomes louder when they look at the kitchen camera (which has broken visuals, its audio only). When coupled with the player noticing that one one of the animatronics is missing, they can deduce that the animatronic is in the kitchen. These unsettling sounds have a purpose in the gameplay.
The most interesting part of the sound design for this game is the detrimental audio, the audio that is there to be a distraction from the truth. One element of this is the choice to have very poor transmission of audio from the cameras, the audio is filtered and manipulated heavily as a means to muddy the information. There are also sounds that are implemented simply to get in the way, to demand attention at a time of intense audio sensitivity. This is the mechanical sound of the cameras turning or the intermittent static. All of this sound is also lightly obscured by the fan in the office, this is a constant sound that is off a similar frequency to the audio from the cameras. These sound design choices are a very clever means to disorient and frustrate the player in a similar way to how one might experience a nightmare, like the feeling of running and going nowhere, there are simple little things that make success so much harder. When paired with a life or death scenario the feeling is intense frustration.
I think that sound has a unique capability in horror games specifically. In my opinion audio hallucination is much less obvious to the subject than visual hallucination, yet holds a great deal of weight in our sense of orientation in reality. We understand a lot of our environment through listening, and in a game context where this audio can not only be manipulated but also interacted with (giving it a greater weight in reality), sound designers can achieve a uniquely disorientating experience.