it feels awesome for the first little while, then you realize that there isn't actually any more depth to the story beyond the introductory hooks. questions are asked and never answered, events occur and they are never explained. you never figure out what is happening or why, or anything about the world or people in it. you pretty much have about as good of an idea about the plot, and what the entities are at the end of the game as reading the store page.
the entities themselves are creepy and intimidating at first, but they very quickly are revealed to be no real threat. [spoiler]other entities such as the marionette are introduced to you as the game progresses and are presented as an additional threat to be wary of. the marionette, for example, is described as a small music box which plays 3 times, and you are warned "DO NOT allow it to play 3 times". there is a tangible sense of dread and fear as these new enemies are exposited to you, as you doubt more and more if it's safe to take the the trash out to the dumpster or if you'll make it through an attack that night. however, there seems to be NO THREAT OUTSIDE OF THE ENTITIES AT THE END OF THE NIGHT, excluding one single jumpscare at the end of day 5 (?). in other words, you don't need to be worried about encountering any enemies which can actually do you direct harm until the very end of every day; enemies do not spawn in the world or pose any threat to you individually, they only spawn all together when an attack is underway. as for the attacks themselves, they are very nervewracking for the first couple nights, but similarly lose their intimidation factor and become very routine. the entity only arrives at the end of the night if you fail to ID a doppelganger, but there are two nights with "blood moons" where the entity arrives no matter what, with doppelganger ID failure only increasing the entity's HP. you get a 60 second countdown before it arrives, every time. the entity has a big HP bar which doubles as a timer, so you could hide and wait it out for the entire duration if you so chose. however we did not choose to do that at any point, and had very little challenge actually dealing with the entity. the first time a marionette spawned with the entity and we heard the music, the panic set in as the fear of the unknown again bubbled up. we tried to sneak around the entity to get to the music box in time, but i was just a moment too slow! three times music, oh no, what's gonna happen??? ...oh, the marionette just spawns a little ghost guy who attacks you and is pretty easily dispatched as well. okay.
once we got over the fear of the unknown and not knowing what it might do to us, it was really obvious that all the entities are capable of doing is trying to trap you in a corner and slowly drain your HP. and seriously, it is pretty slow - I've been on fire from a molotov while getting attacked by the entity and a marionette, and i came out with 89/175 HP. even without the HP upgrades I'd still have been alive. even if you DO get to 0hp, you just end up crawling on the ground in a "downed" stance until your teammate revives you. I'm assuming if everyone gets to 0 it's game over, but we didn't even remotely get close to that. supposedly the entity gets stronger the more doppelgangers you let through, but we made plenty of mistakes and had little challenge, even on the final days. [/spoiler]
also, just wanna say that my review would have been much more glowing if not for the ending. [spoiler]I played through with my friend and we were clearing 5 star reviews and easily making $100-200+ per day. On the second-last day, we were at around $240, only $10 short of the $250 required to complete the game and get your pet's medicine. This netted us about $25-35 per day. Out of nowhere you get a suspicious and aggressive email from someone who says they know you're poor and can't afford the vet bill, so you should call the sheriff to come in tomorrow and your bill will be covered. Knowing we'd easily clear that much money, and suspecting that it was a trap to lure you into a "bad ending" where you betray your boss and get fired or something, we chose to not call the sheriff. Then you start the final day, and everything changes as the odds are suddenly completely stacked against you. You are swarmed with problems and doppelgangers to take care of, as expected, which was a nice challenge. There are scores of troublemakers who run in and need to be cleared out, while also shooting at doppelgangers. Unfortunately, my friend missed one shot at the very start of the shift and hit a troublemaker by mistake, which is a $15 penalty. No biggie, we make tons of money every day, and we still have all day to get customers! Except, no you don't, because you get rugpulled and you have effectively no real income on the last day. Even with clearing up all the obstacles rapidly and still maintaining a rating above 4 stars, only ONE SINGLE CUSTOMER came through for the entire day. This netted us a total revenue for the day of only $35, which meant we only got $3.50, and we got the bad ending. The game cheekily tells you as you close the credits that your save file has now been modified and you'll need to play it again to get the good endings, teehee![/spoiler]
even outside of that, the ending is disappointing. [spoiler]at some point through the last day, the dentist (which has been stalking you the entire game and consistently built-up as a threat through dialogue with npcs and jumpscares) appears at the front counter; upon shooting it you end up locked into a sprinting obby. if you die, you just get revived and booted back to the start of the obby. you run through several extradimensional rooms and places, then find yourself running into an office with a faceless man sitting in the chair. then poof, you're teleported back to the store, and the story is over. it's not explained wtf just happened, why it happened, how you survived, or if you've now "defeated" these entities or merely live to die another day.[/spoiler]
So in essence, the "challenge" of the game is not surviving the entities at all. It's getting through a final level whose "challenge" consists of rug-pulling you on the home stretch, and effectively locking you into a bad ending unless you are UNBELIEVABLY lucky. Again, we had a PERFECT RUN up until the last day.
With this in mind, it is also worth noting that there is NO PENALTY for allowing doppelgangers to pass beyond the entity showing up and wandering around the store for ~3 minutes at the end of the day. You actually get REWARDED for letting doppelgangers through, because as far as we could tell, the doppelgangers pay you with real money which is counted towards your store revenue for the day. It seems if you really wanted to most easily get the "true ending", you just process every transaction as normal and stock up on tons of weapons. We didn't even stock up *that* much, only unlocking the full weapons locker on the final day, and we still had very little challenge in combat even when faced with multiple enemies. considering how many doppelgangers we inadvertently let through, and having read other reviews, i think you might HAVE to do this in order to get enough money.
I was really impressed with it at first, and I certainly would have found the game much more compelling in the end if the story felt like it actually respected my time. But no, I'm not gonna bother playing this game again, whether for endless mode or going through the story again to try to get a better ending. I'd have been perfectly happy to have left a positive review having completed the game with nothing changed, all the way up until the final day. When you make the "challenge" to be surviving the game designer writing a level designed to piss you off with all the mechanics suddenly changed without warning as a "challenge", you're not writing a good game, you're compensating with artificial difficulty.
