I will die on the hill that SL was the actual turning point where animatronic designs went to shit
>FNAF 1: They look like actual animatronics. If not the game's popularity you could place those into an actual joint and no one would bat an eye, but they're still unsettling when they go murder mode. Perfect example of scary in context, not tryhard design.
>FNAF 2: Withereds look like they're supposed to - withered animatronics and are deliberately trying to be creepy, but overall still (Visually) simple robots as well as Toys, with Mangle being the weirdest and still just being an amalgam of spare parts
>FNAF 3: Previous designs, but burnt to shit. Featuring Springtrap the peak of Scott's design because he's a zombie trapped in the skeleton of his suit
>FNAF 4: A bit tryhard on the scary theme, but it makes sense due to the entire game being a nightmare of a kid.
And then you get Sister Location, where the skeleton of the robots there is just a bunch of fucking sentient wire and everything looks like a damn spaceship with super clean panels and shit, despite being made somewhere alongside the 1 crew. It feels like they belong to a whole other setting entirely.
I get that 2 is the earliest game and it already had bullshit like "AI Face recognition" on toys, but at least they still felt believeable because they were still fucking animatronics.