Ultimate Custom Night was what I had been wanting this whole time, a lore-irrelevant FNaF game where you could play against the animatronics and their unique abilities, and it's just THAT. For get the whole Afton in hell thing, forget the whole Cassidy possessing Golden Freddy and having a Celestial Seizure over his inability to exact a satisfying revenge. Forget Father Consequences giving sage wisdom before you drown yourself in the lake (you can't kill what's already dead). By then, people were getting pretty sick of Freddy's and had moved on to Roblox, or Minecraft, or whatever else. I'd moved back to my favorite zone of legacy games on DOS, NES, and Atari.

FNaF continued though, with Scott in control of direction, and Steel Wool Studios taking over production. It goot ported to new platforms, more plushies, more Legos, more merch. More younger kids got into it, more of us older people started looking to fanmade games because the new games were not as scary (for a reason - do you want nastygrams from angry parents complaining your game gives their kids nightmares, to which you WANT to reprimand their poor parenting, but they will reprimand you for not understanding how hard it is to be a parent!). I can live without parents my age giving their toddlers plushies and then giving me leery looks when my wife says I like that game a the parents don't realize their kid is playing with animatronics that eat people and stuff them into mechanisms that cause lacerations and massive blood loss. I don't miss it one bit.

Now this....THIS is a masterpiece. It makes up for any and all of the shark-jumping that occured beforehand. All the "Freddy goes into space on a shhip made of remnant and revives the flower children with Foxy's ear" kind of stuff. This is classic, straightforward, borderline-insane, FNaF as I knew and loved it - kinda sorta. Basically, fend off animatronics for a few hours, and done. That's it.

Honestly, the open-endedness of this game is what makes it so amusing. I played it on my 4K TV, on mute at one point, and I do say it's a lot like experiencing a fever-dream in real time. You've got a foam hand with a milk crate just randomly spawning, strange advertisements with uncanny valley characters, some chicken with papparazzi, Nightmare Bonnie "Riding the Snake" (remember that Drew Carey SNL Skit?), and best of all....Mr. Hippo....seriously, if there was sa FNaF character that was the embodiment of me....it'd be Mr. Hippo...I tend to do the same thing he does, and get the same reaction he does......

My friend....you just game upon an unfortunate, unfortunate circumstance. Kind of reminds me of my good good friend Orville. He was trying to buy some rye bread at this German bakery and got stung by hornets trying to sweep them off the rye bread....or was it rye bread, maybe it was a pimento loaf? Anyway....(minutes upon minutes pass)....and then the ducks came and tried to peck at Orville's feet. He tried giving them rye bread, bu they ran when the Hornets came and tried to sting them, so he just threw the loaf under a Hornet's nest in the woods. How'd he get there? Well, that's anyone's guess, but I'm guessing he can use that magic want of his to teleport. Now I've never seen this before but I.....(more and more minutes pass).....and so that's how we had a lovely day at Oktoberfest....so what was the whole point of my story now!?!?

Seriously, Mr. Hippo always makes me laugh. It's like, "dude, I am not your friend, you just killed me, now you're giving me 15 minute long essays about Orville Elephant, Ducks, Rye Bread, and Ponds minus Old-Man Consequences in a form of some kind of drawn-out apology". I guess Mr. Hippo is a nice guy though. Go figure.