People dunk on FNAF now but back when it first came out it did give the indie horror game scene a defibrillator charge. Games from that time were getting a bit stale. The Slenderman game took off years ago and that had a major impact on the games from that point on. It was a bunch of wandering around generic spooky locations collecting keys/ pages/ etc. Maybe there’d be a generic story you could understand from reading journal pages that are for some reason torn out of the book and scattered everywhere and when you hear the chase music hit the run button until it stopped. I was legit getting bored of watching lets plays back then because the games were kinda the same.

FNAF genuinely did shake things up back then until it was trend to make 500 FNAF clones at least. Even the clones would be slightly more interesting than the Slender clones because you still at the very minimum had to come up with a cast of characters that all did something or you used preexisting characters that all had to do something. You couldn’t just grab assets and throw them together haphazardly.

Even still if you go back to the first game FNAF has def lost its edge. It leaned into the horror for kids model and it certainly made them money from that