Thanks to this franchise, you'd likely never look at Chuck E. Cheese's, animatronics, or night shifts the same way again. Hell, the first game has even made people so scared that they've sworn off Chuck E. Cheese's for life!
The cameras are perpetually disabled in the kitchen and are somewhat unreliable throughout the rest of the diner. If you can't find one of the robots on your monitors, they could be in one of those rooms. Or they might be just outside the door. Or maybe they're already in the room, ready to scream at you as soon as you lower your monitor.
Your limited power supply. If you want to make it through the night, you have to be very careful about your power consumption. Anytime you look at the cameras, close one or both doors, or use your door lights, you're eating up your power. So whenever you decide to use either of those devices, be careful or you'll be left defenseless and be killed by Freddy.
Golden Freddy appears if you even just glance at his poster in the West Hall, can get in the guard room even with both doors closed, has literally no eyes, and just sits in front of you. There's no sound or any other warning aside from a poster in a hallway that changes randomly (If you see a poster with his face, it means he's there, with you, and you haven't noticed yet). Unless you go back to the camera panel and switch to another location, you'll be dead in a split second.
The exceptionally rare "eyeless Bonnie" screen. All you see is Bonnie's lifeless face, with absolutely nothing to be heard. Then two small white pupils pop up, staring directly at you.
Keeping track of Bonnie and Chica are one thing, but once you see Foxy poking his head out from behind the curtain, you never know when he's gonna make his mad dash to your location.
Sometimes, either Bonnie or Chica can be visible in both cameras in their usual sides near the office. Time to check the doorway... there's no one there. Go back to the mobile, and see that they're still near the doorway. You check the doorway again, and see no one. When are they coming? But if you just wait for them to come, Foxy would come...
In the first game, there were only two doors to your office. Through diligent work, you could keep the animatronics shut out. Here, there are no doors, a single central opening into your station,and two wide-open vents on your sides.Confrontation is inevitable. The bright side is that you instead use a mask to fool the animatronics, but be aware that some of them aren't fooled by the mask and will still come after you.
The Phone Dude's talking of fire risk and the legacy of the company leads the protagonist to hallucinate the old animatronics with severe burn damage around the building. At least, that's one interpretation. The other is that the spirits of the children are influencing your hallucinations or that the hallucinations are the killer's ghost's attempts to hinder you to make it easier for Springtrap to kill you. The character sheet for the protagonist also speculates that he might be somewhat precognative and is seeing hints to the building's eventual fate.
The Phantoms can be this for the player as well, since you have to manage the technology, and the hallucinations (especially the Phantom Puppet) can give Springtrap some time to find you.
The game is set inside the main character's house. Not a job that can be escaped, but a house… and they can be in the hallway, in the closet, anywhere. The character isn't safe in his own home.
Picture it this way: A child is left home alone at night with a bunch of robots that want to harm them, said robots have slaughtered numerous big and burly adult security guards. This child has to last six hours against these things for at least five nights in a pitch black house, with a flashlight as his only means of seeing anything.
The breathing mechanic. Basically, animatronics that are in front of your door will breathe heavily, and this is a signal to not use your flashlight and hold the door closed until they go away. Of course, this means that every time you go to the door- which you'll be doing A LOT, you stare out into the inky blackness, hoping and praying that nothing is there. If you hear breathing, then you're half a foot away from the jaws of one of these monsters, and even flicking on that flashlight for a second will kill you. Choose wisely.
For Real Life: you are trapped with an older sibling who uses your fears against you, will terrorize you on a regular basis, and leave you trapped in a place where children and employees have died, and ultimately leads to you receiving a serious injury. And given the time period, the 1980s, Social Services Does Not Exist and There Are No Therapists for the child protagonist.
