One of the hottest demos at PAX West 2024 came from the Five Nights at Freddy’s team, which offered a preview of Secret of the Mimic on PlayStation VR2.
PAX West 2024 was a big show for FNAF in general, with one of the largest booths in the expo hall. Attendees could celebrate the franchise’s tenth anniversary with a series of regularly scheduled birthday parties, held in a big open mock-up of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza in its heyday. The Five Nights at Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic VR demo was in an enclosed space nearby, with a packed line on every day of the convention.
Secret of the Mimic is the 11th game in the FNAF series and the fourth developed by Steel Wool Studios. While it’s best known at this point for Five Nights at Freddy's, Steel Wool has a long history in VR on its own. Its other VR games include Bounce, Mars Odyssey, and Quar: Battle for Gate 18, all of which came out in 2016.
The demo consists of two short levels, both featuring elaborate chase sequences through a dilapidated toy factory. As the title suggests, the Mimic – first seen in the 2022 prose anthology Tales from the Pizzaplex #1 – is the primary antagonist of Secret of the Mimic. However, I didn’t see him in this demo. Instead, I was pursued through the factory’s back offices and maintenance corridors by a new enemy named Jackie, because sometimes, games journalism means you volunteer to get repeatedly murdered by a mechanical clown/spider.
The demo starts in the office of a factory building, which looked abandoned but still largely operational. The lights were still on, and the general impression I got was that this place had shut down for the night at some point but had never been allowed to reopen. Progressing requires activating a giant jack-in-the-box in a storeroom, which reveals the enormous marionette inside. This lets me take the crank, which is used on a nearby device to open the next door but also sets the marionette loose on you.
This is Jackie: half of a deranged robot jester that drags itself around the factory on its two enormous, extendable arms. She’s got no lower half because she yanked herself free of her box to come choke me out. Good times. I was first pursued into an office, where a robot cheerfully went about “sorting” (read: shredding) all the mail it can reach, that is until Jackie finds you. You must pull-start a generator to open a nearby doorway, but the floor collapses beneath you shortly thereafter.
The rest of the demo involves staying one step ahead of Jackie, who's always right on my heels. Secret of the Mimic puts a lot of effort into its chase sequences, where any time you miss a necessary step or take an extra second to figure out what to do, Jackie will instantly cancel your birthday.
The next few minutes are a series of quick scares and quicker decisions. The path through the factory is littered with ventilation shafts, switches you need to pull, and crumbling catwalks, with Jackie right behind me the entire time. Even when she can’t reach me, she's always audible, if not visible, skittering around in the shadows like a spider.
It's a harrowing experience with very little margin for error. The floor demo features typical locomotion with a 90-degree perspective snap that's bound to the right analog stick. In a decent quality-of-life option, anything I could interact with is given a blue outline as soon as it enters my range, and each area is carefully lit to highlight necessary features like gate switches. If you’re looking for a decent entry-level VR game, as well as one that’ll scare somebody’s pants off, Secret of the Mimic seems to have you covered.
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic arrives in 2025 for PC, PS5, and PlayStation VR2.
