You need 12 uninterrupted days to catch up on all of FNAF’s lore

Thanks to its explosive popularity and touch of goofiness, practically every internet-dwelling gamer knows at least a little bit about Five Nights at Freddy’s. This is even more true in recent years, thanks to the blockbuster film of the same name, but aside from the haunted animatronics, dead kids, and William Afton always coming back, how much of the bizarre and disturbing series lore do you know? How much do you want to know?

As an avid fan of Markiplier and a lover of deep dives, I consider myself pretty up-to-date on the lore of Scott Cawthon’s indie horror game empire, but with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 set to hit theaters on December 5, 2025, I wondered just how long it would take a newcomer to absorb everything the FNAFverse has to offer first-hand, rather than through let’s plays or Game Theory videos, and the answer shocked me.

First, let’s start with the games. My data set includes all of the mainline titles, Help Wanted 1+2, Into the Pit, Ultimate Custom Night, and FNAF World, which is surprisingly lore-heavy for a silly fantasy RPG. I left out any of the charity spoof games like Freddy in Space 2, as these add nothing to the mainline series’ lore, as well as Special Delivery, the AR mobile game, as it’s no longer available to download. According to completionist data taken from HowLongToBeat, it’ll take you 222.5 hours to learn all there is to know from the games. That’s just over nine days straight.

Then we have the books. The many, many books. The FNAF literary canon includes the original trilogy, 12 Fazbear Frights novels, and eight Tales from the Pizzaplex short story collections, each containing three tales. All of these works add up to over 1.83 million words of lore that either directly influenced the direction of the games or helped to flesh out the overall FNAFverse.

There’s some overlap between the games and the books, with Into the Pit following the Fazbear Frights book of the same name very closely, and the Mimic character drawing inspiration from various Tales short stories, but for the full picture, it’s still worth reading the books and playing the games. We gave the former a 9/10 in our FNAF: Into the Pit review, after all.

I worked out the estimated word count of each book using its page count and information from Book Editing Services, which states that a 400-page book usually has 125k words, meaning one page of a book has roughly 312.5 words. Then, I used reading speed data cited on Scholar Within to work out how long it would take the average adult to read each book. The average adult has a reading speed of 220 to 350 words per minute, so depending on where you fall on that spectrum, reading every single FNAF book would take you 87 to 139 hours, or between three to five more days.

Taking all the raw numbers and factoring in the 110 minutes of runtime from the original FNAF movie, it would take the average adult at least 12 days straight to fully catch up on the series’ lore, and it could take up to 15 days if you’re a slow reader. There are 47 days until the movie hits theaters, so if you dedicate three hours a day every day to becoming a FNAF lore master, you can get there in time! Or, like me, you can just watch other people do it on YouTube.

If you haven’t heard, FNAF 2 cast Megan Fox in an unexpected role, and there’s a new FNAF game on the horizon, but it’s coming exclusively to Roblox. Not that that’s a bad thing – we’ve got a list of all the best Roblox horror games to show you just how spooky the platform can get. Alternatively, check out our FNAF Puppet guide to learn more about one of the sequel’s key players.