Five Nights at Freddy’s 3: Survive Springtrap in the Ultimate Horror Attraction

Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is a point-and-click survival horror game where players work as a night security guard at a haunted attraction built on the ruins of a notorious pizza chain. Hunted by a single decaying animatronic called Springtrap, players must juggle camera feeds, audio lures, and failing systems to make it through five terrifying nights.

The game was developed and published by Scott Cawthon, releasing for Windows on March 2, 2015. Mobile versions followed quickly — Android on March 6 and iOS on March 12 of the same year. Years later, on November 29, 2019, ports landed on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One alongside other entries in the series.

The Setting: Fazbear’s Fright

The story drops players into Fazbear’s Fright, a horror-themed attraction inspired by Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza — a family restaurant that shut down thirty years before the events of the game. The crew building the attraction is hunting down old artifacts to display, including cassette tapes left behind by a former employee. These tapes play at the start of each night and slowly piece together what really happened at the original location.

Then they find Springtrap. A worn-out yellow rabbit animatronic, dragged out of storage and brought right into the building where you’re working.

How the Gameplay Works

Unlike the earlier games, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 only has one threat that can actually kill you — Springtrap. He moves through the attraction with unsettling intelligence, and your job is to slow him down. You can’t fight back. You can’t even leave your office.

What you can do is monitor two camera networks, seal off air vents to block his path, and play audio clips through the speakers to lure him somewhere else. It’s a cat-and-mouse setup that rewards patience over panic.

Three systems run in the background: cameras, audio, and ventilation. They break down at random and need a slow reboot to come back online — and that reboot leaves you exposed. Let the ventilation fail too long and the screen starts to warp. That’s when the phantom animatronics show up.

Phantoms and Jumpscares

Familiar faces from past games — Freddy, Chica, Foxy, Balloon Boy, Marionette, and Mangle — appear as ghostly hallucinations. They can’t kill you. But if one pops up in your office, you’ll get jumpscared and one of your systems goes down. Annoying, distracting, and sometimes fatal in the long run.

If Springtrap actually reaches the office? Game over.

Minigames and Two Endings

Between nights, players can dive into Atari-style minigames that flesh out the lore behind the original restaurant. The first batch shows the original animatronics being destroyed by a mysterious purple figure. Later, ghosts of those same animatronics corner him — and he hides inside a yellow rabbit suit. The springlocks fail. He doesn’t make it out.

Six secret minigames can be unlocked across the week, each focused on a specific character. How players handle these unlocks determines which of the two endings they get. The main campaign runs five nights with a brutal sixth night for those who want more.

Story Hooks Worth Paying Attention To

The cassette tapes carry most of the narrative weight. Early ones explain springlock suits — costumes that double as animatronics. Later tapes warn employees to stop using them after “multiple simultaneous springlock failures.” Other tapes mention hidden safe rooms at every old Freddy Fazbear’s location, eventually sealed off without explanation.

By the end of the sixth night, a newspaper clipping reveals Fazbear’s Fright burned down. Cause unknown. Everything that survived the fire? Headed to public auction.

Reception

Reviews landed in mixed-to-positive territory. Metacritic gave the PC version a 68 out of 100. Critics generally liked the reworked camera system — PC Gamer’s Omri Petitte and Destructoid’s Nic Rowen both said it gave players real reasons to use the cameras instead of treating them as background noise.

Springtrap got a lot of love too. TouchArcade’s Shaun Musgrave called him the most intelligent and ghastly antagonist in the series, mostly because he’s so unpredictable. Rowen said the combination of Springtrap and the new mechanics made it the most technically satisfying entry up to that point.

Not everything landed. Some critics felt the phantom animatronics were repetitive and stripped of personality. Nintendo Life’s Mitch Vogel argued that having only one real threat made the game easier than the previous entries — a fair point, though Petitte felt the opposite, saying the tension never let up. The story’s required minigames also drew criticism for feeling like a chore, especially for players chasing the good ending.

Game Controls

• Mouse — point-and-click navigation across the office and camera feeds
• Left click — open camera panel, switch between camera networks, seal vents, play audio lures
• Hover — view office areas and access maintenance panel for system reboots

Game Tags: horror, survival, point-and-click, animatronic, jumpscare, indie, single-player, suspense, FNAF, Springtrap, cameras, atmospheric

As always, remember to have fun!

How to Play:

MOUSE to look around office
Left Mouse Button to use Cameras/Maintenance Panel
SPACE BAR while hovering over Vent Camera buttons to seal vents