Examining One Night at Flumpty’s – A Chaos God of Death (who’s an egg)

Posted on by Luke Greensmith

The following article contains spoilers for the One Night At Flumpty’s games. If you want to experience the surprises first hand ‘One Night At Flumpty’s: The Egg Collection’ is on PC, all gaming consoles, and the series is also available on mobile devices. Another great alternative is watching YouTubers play through the games.

One Night at Flumpty’s 1

“Hi! I’m Flumpty Bumpty. I’m an egg. I’m immune to the plot, and can transcend time and space. Also, I’m coming after you. You can figure out the rest. Have fun!” *Giggle*

This is how it begins. The player has been kidnapped by Flumpty to play a game. If the player wins? They become Flumpty Bumpty’s new best friend! If they lose? He kills them and eats their eyes. Part one in the series is a relatively simple Five Night’s At Freddy’s fan game recreating the first FNaF entry pretty closely, only with a cast of surreal cartoon characters as the antagonists. The player is in a security office with two doors and a limited supply of energy powering the devices they need to survive a night. The only new gameplay element compared to FNaF 1 is a murderous clown called Grunkfuss who will gradually creep through a hole in the wall as the player uses the cameras they need to survive, forcing additional decision making as the in-game night goes on to avoid being jumpscared – ending the game with a “Game Over Easy” egg pun.

Going from 12am to 6am in the game takes only 9 minutes, but juggling all the cartoon characters out for blood can easily overwhelm a player until they have gotten a good grasp of the patterns they need to follow. Instead of 6am the clock turns to “HAM” upon completing the game (weirdly, this will become important later).

It was simple, it was fun, and a lot of people enjoyed it quite a lot. Which then led to a sequel fan game to match the Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel.

One Night at Flumpty’s 2

“Welcome one and all to Flumpty Bumpty’s, if your lights are turned off then you’re safe… If your lights are on then they’ll come find you and rip you a brand new face.”

A jaunty tune from a record player introduces the player to the sequel game. On top of the tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of the cute attitude with the brutal threat, a gameplay element is introduced as well as an allusion to how an “Eyesaur” character is made by Flumpty out of people who previously failed his games. This entry almost didn’t happen, as the creator Jonochrome didn’t want to make something similar to the second FNaF game, but he had a dream that led to the main mechanic of the ONaF sequel. Well, more of a nightmare, were he was in a garage watching monsters go past the door. Any time the monster would stop to look in, he had to turn the light off until they went away.

This becomes the main mechanic of the game, with the introduction of an ‘Exposure’ meter that rises as monsters look in on the player. You can’t just hide in the dark as the laptop you need to use to monitor the bizarre cast of killer cartoons charges when the light is on, and an owl that can see in the dark needs a lot of monitoring. This sequel was much less of a fan game, and a lot more of its own distinct franchise now. The expanded cast of oddball creations includes such things as The Redman, who has a brilliant comedic origin story for a monster which can be seen sometimes on a mocked up newspaper: “Man drinks lava and lives (kinda)”. The series as a whole is filled with brilliant weirdness to explore for sharp eyed players, or else those watching someone else trying to survive the night.

Survive this second night? The timer goes from 5am to “SPAM”. The HAM and SPAM joke will directly inspire the third and final game in an odd way. But before that happened…

One Week at Flumpty’s

The planned One Week at Flumpty’s never came to be. The creator burned out pretty hard on a something he didn’t really want to make with characters he didn’t want to become solely known for. He didn’t even particularly want to make any horror games, let alone fan games of a different horror franchise. Some core characters and jokes were from his circle of friends when they were younger, especially Flumpty Bumpty and Birthday Boy Blam, so as flattering as it is that a wider audience were appreciating them Jonochrome stopped production of the One Week game. Eventually a series of three One Week at Flumpty’s cartoons were made for YouTube but the game itself is long retired, and the overall series was then supposed to end with only two installments.

Jonochrome set up his email to automatically delete any mention of the series or its characters, and intended to move on with his life. Although in a stroke of luck, he popped in to check his Trash folder one day and spotted an email from Scott Cawthon, the creator of Five Nights at Freddy’s, with an offer to join a fan game initiative to give official releases to prominent fan game creators with Jonochrome to go first. So the first two games were set for a remaster to rerelease basically everywhere, with the addition of a brand new third game in the series…

One Night At Flumpty’s 3

“Hiya best friend! Wouldn’t you know it? After all this time you still haven’t survived until 6am! But if ya ever do, I’ll finally let you leave. Until then, friends? Let’s play…”

Two things eventually inspired the third and final One Night at Flumpty’s. One part of this was another dream, or else nightmare, where Jonochrome was in a small building in the middle of a freezing blizzard. There were doors all around him, and he had to keep checking them so the Flumpty characters couldn’t come in. This wouldn’t quite translate into a game, as a player could just spin around to stay safe, but it led to a temperature mechanic being a core concept for the third game. Then there was one other thing which really inspired how the series had to end.

The player had never gotten to 6am. The clock in each other game would say something dumb related to food which traditionally goes with eggs instead, and the character of Flumpty can warp with time and space. The whole trilogy was one night of Flumpty messing with the player, and this lit a spark that finally finished One Night at Flumpty’s.

It all begins simple enough. Familiar faces (or two faces stitched together in the case of the owl and beaver from the first two games now being Frankenstein’d together) will roam around on security cameras looking for a chance to sneak into the room the kidnapped player is hiding in. The new game mechanics are a temperature gage along with a furnace to warn up next to, which isn’t always safe, and a camera flash to chase away the monstrous cartoon characters before they can jumpscare the player. It goes from 5am to SALAMI in a now familiar food gag, but then something even stranger than usual happens.

The clock rewinds to midnight and Flumpty, who had been suspiciously absent apart from the opening phone call, says in a creepy singsong voice: “My turn”. The room you are in has changed, the assorted characters you have outwitted up to this point lie brutally killed in one of the rooms you can view over security camera, and now a whole host of monstrous versions of Flumpty Bumpty begin to roam everywhere. The chaos only escalates until as the in-game night progresses something even stranger again happens. This music begins to play:

Eleggctroswing is an indelible earworm that burrows its way into the player’s brain all the harder because of the context. On top of being a well made and fun little tune, it comes at the height of action for any point in the series to throw the player off. Diegetically being Flumpty taunting and attempting to distract the player, all in line with the user interface becoming random to further overwhelm the malicious egg’s chosen victim. Even a subsequent Hard Boiled game mode completing this Flumpty Night in Five Nights at Flumpty’s 3 isn’t as difficult as what’s going on when this absurdly upbeat tune kicks in. Hard Boiled mode here being more of a final bow encore for all the characters involved, as well as giving a happier true ending (Flumpty letting you out after finally seeing 6am for the first time in the series leading to a destroyed world, likely a joke by Flumpty Bumpty at the player’s expense).

When all is said and done, One Night at Flumpty’s is a fun game with an engagingly absurd premise around a lethal omnipotent egg and a cast of likewise dangerous playmates. The full One Night at Flumpty’s: The Egg Collection is a compact, finely tuned, short-yet-incredibly-sweet horror experience that is well worth a horror fan’s time.

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