Five Nights at Freddy’s
Tales From the Pizzaplex #1
By: Scott Cawthon, Kelly Parra, & Andrea Waggener
*This post contains spoilers for Lally’s Game & other stories from Five Nights at Freddy’s Tales From the Pizzaplex
Click the link for an overview of Frailty and Lally’s Game the first two stories in Tales From the Pizzaplex #1
Overview:
Maya is spending her 16th birthday at Freddy Fazbears Mega Pizzaplex with her friends Noelle and Jaxon. The fun center is a blast of neon colors and fun rides. Maya is excited for one ride in particular. An augmented reality where she can have the biggest party celebrating her for her birthday.
The problem is… the ride is under construction.
But the doesn’t stop her. She sneaks into the ride and is transported into a party customized for her. Her family and friends are there and the cake is customized with her favorite flowers. Everything is perfect.
Once they finished, Jaxon convinced them all to go on the roller coaster that customized your ride and you got to take home a video of your ride.
The next day Maya celebrates her birthday with her family at their modest but heartfelt party. Her grandparents gift her a gold pendant in the shape of a rose.
At the end of the night Maya goes to bed with a headache but satisfied that she got everything she could have wanted for her birthday.
Flash forward to the following year and Maya is spending her seventeenth birthday saying goodbye to one of her Grandmas who loses her battle with cancer. Within a few weeks all three of Maya’s remaining Grandparents get diagnosed with cancer and all eventually pass. Then her beloved neighbor succumbs to the disease as well. Soon, it seems as if everyone around her is getting diagnosed.
The worst part is, no one seems concerned. Everyone is acting as if these things happen and it is not odd that the hospitals are full and people are dying.
Maya decides to go with Noelle to visit their favorite teacher who just had a baby. At the teacher’s house, Maya notices that something seems off. When she goes to hold the baby, it is not a baby at all. Instead, it is a faceless almost blob-like creature. Again, Maya is the only one that seems to think that anything is wrong.
Soon, more and more blob-like creatures are appearing everywhere.
Maya starts to contemplate the thought that maybe none of this is real. Perhaps her headaches mean her brain was altered by the machine and that’s why her reality is altered.
She continues to take care of everyone until she is the last one left. The blob creatures begin to duplicate and before she knows it, Maya is engulfed. She expects to die by the weight and lack of air but remains conscious waiting for the end that never comes.
The End
Blobs as a Representation of Cancer
Everyone but Maya dies of cancer. Cancer cells replicate fast and destroy the body. The blobs take over the world and replicate until they smother Maya. She can’t escape the blobs just like she can’t escape everyone she loves dying of the disease.
Maya’s Fate
As always with these books, it is hard to say what actually has happened. The options are: this is real and the world has fallen apart or the AR machine augmented her brain and she is stuck in an alternate reality.
I don’t think the world was attacked by some sort of blob creature so I believe the second option. The way I see it, Maya is stuck in the alternate reality. This would make sense because everyone who is dying seems to be passing in order that they would normally. Her grandparents die first, then other adults and finally children.
She doesn’t appear to be aging but that could be due to AR device. Or possibly, she is experiencing time differently and she is still sitting in the Mega Pizzaplex inside of the ride. If she is still inside the ride, this would explain why everyone is dying in the simulation. There is probably not enough information to make it run forever so it is filling in the gaps.
This would also explain why anyone born has no face or structure. Maya’s mind is controlling everything and she can’t make up babies who were born after she went into the machine. She can only have people in her world who she knew.
Overall,
I kept waiting for a twist or some kind of tension within the story. I feel as if this story as well as the other entries (Frailty and Lally’s Game) didn’t live up to the greatness of other Five Nights at Freddy’s books.
If you had to skip one book in the anthology it would unfortunately be this one.
Don’t be discouraged if this is the first book you read from these authors. Some of the others are absolutely fantastic and the different series in this world as a whole are worth the read.
Rating: 2/5 stars
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