Popgoes Arcade: the fan spin-off Scott Cawthon made official

A retro RPG that swaps the pizzeria for a forest and asks patience of you first — the rest comes after.

Out of the pizzeria, into a corrupted forest

Scott Cawthon's name is on Popgoes Arcade as producer, and he didn't write a line of the adventure: the game is the work of a fan, Kane Carter, made under the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, the program the series runs to make room for outside projects. What came of it pulls you away from the pizzeria that defined the franchise and drops you in a corrupted forest, chasing hostile animals, items and abilities — the mission, as the store page itself puts it, is to save the world twice. Familiar faces turn up, Chica the chicken and Foxy the pirate among them, but they share the screen with newcomers like Popgoes the weasel and Manora the rat.

The campaign that opens the adventure, 'The Dead Forest', stood on its own since 2020; the Steam version arrives with a previously unreleased sequel, 'Popgoes and the Machinist', which unlocks only once the first one is finished. In 2025 the game itself got an overhaul called Fighting Chance, which redrew part of the mechanics and the art and brought in battle gifts — random modifiers that scramble every fight. The look is the pixel art of the minigames the series uses to tell its own story; here that style is the whole game.

A self-imposed deadline, met on exactly the right anniversary

In June 2024, Kane Carter posted a fifteen-minute video laying out the entire update he had in the works. He kept the deadline he had set himself: the package shipped exactly one year later, on the Popgoes series' ninth anniversary. Months of fine-tuning followed — a fix for an achievement that wasn't unlocking, a round of corrections titled WRAPPED UP! and, more recently, an update that is still tinkering with the game's balance.

What you step into is a game that keeps getting attention: somewhere in that maintenance calendar, the Popgoes universe even picked up a phone app of its own, myPOPGOES — a sign that Kane Carter, who signs his own announcements simply as 'Kane', still treats this RPG as a living project rather than a closed release.

The players who came back years later to finish both endings

Everyone who writes about Popgoes Arcade lands on the same turn: the frame is cute arcade, but the series' usual unease lives underneath it, and that clash is what holds you. One player who finished the adventure with everything found, across 28 hours logged as of September 23, describes the mix as a crossing of the goofy humour of the opening with stretches of real strategy, and singles out the secrets tucked around the map as the part most worth hunting for. Another, 35 hours in as of September 5, calls the game a rare find and recommends it to anyone who likes a retro adventure with a mystery buried in it.

Some had it shelved for years: one player picked the campaign back up on August 31, having set it aside soon after the original release, and closed out both endings after all that time on hold — describing the result as a taste of what's coming in the series' next chapter, which he already refers to by the name circulating among fans. The caveat this most devoted group lets slip between the compliments is always the same, and it applies to you too if you go in: be careful in fights, and get in the habit of saving often, because one bad encounter can cost you.

The same slow pace, from the side of the players who quit

On Steam, where the game is sold, approval runs wide and the dissenting voices are few — but they keep landing on the same spot. The most repeated complaint isn't about what the game is, it's about how fast it moves. One player who dropped the adventure after just 1 hour, on August 29, spells the obstacle out: the character walks far too slowly, random encounters cut exploration short every few steps, and scraping together money to face the bosses becomes an obligation rather than a choice; the fighting itself, he sums up, adds little — block, then mash the same button. A French player, 18 hours on the clock as of September 8, reaches the same complaint about pacing from another direction: he had to keep the game at double speed from start to finish, and he rounds out his list of drawbacks with the graphics, flagged as the weak point alongside a soundtrack he praises.

Others complain about things outside the gameplay. A Russian player, writing on September 7, regrets the absence of his own language: every clue and every mechanic's name has to be translated on the fly, which weighs heavier still on someone who already spends the day reading dense text. And a player expecting the jolt the main franchise is famous for, who landed in a pixel RPG instead, sums up the letdown by comparing what he found to an unfinished amateur project — the exact opposite of what the people who came away liking it tend to describe. It's the same obstacle the fans themselves mention in passing, except here nobody forgives it: it separates the players who push past the early slowness from the ones who close the game inside that first hour — and that opening stretch is where you'll decide which side you're on.

Walk slowly, and the forest appears

Patience is the first thing Popgoes Arcade charges you, ahead of anything else. The same slow pace that has one player switching on double speed is what has another closing the game inside the first hour — and setting the write-ups side by side, that line is always the one dividing the two camps, not a taste for the franchise or for the genre. Push past that friction and you reach the rest: two campaigns, hidden endings, secrets that reward anyone coming back years after walking away, and the kind of uncomfortable joke the series has been built on for a long time.

This isn't the game for anyone after the instant scare of the main franchise, or for anyone already wary of an RPG with simple combat. Accept the slow walk and the forest appears, and the rest comes with it — once you're inside, it doesn't let go easily.