There Are 2,800 Fortnite Skins, But Only The FNAF Skins Have This Special Feature

There are thousands of Fortnite skins, but not many of them have anything unique to offer beyond their visual designs. The skins in the Five Nights at Freddy’s Set–Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy–are among those rare exceptions, though, in a way that we haven’t seen before. These skins don’t just look uncannily great doing Fortnite dances–they also do something that no previous Fortnite skins do.

A small proportion of Fortnite skins are “reactive,” meaning they can respond in some way to what’s going on during a match. Some relatively common examples are a character lighting up when music plays, like many of the music Icon skins, or making a sound when you get a kill, like Heatwave PJ from the Chapter 7 Season 3 battle pass.

But the Five Nights at Freddy’s skins introduced a new one: When you take damage during a match while wearing one of these skins, pieces fall off the character model, permanently damaging it. The damage stays until you die or the match ends, even if you heal up. You can turn this effect off in the locker, or even choose to always have them look beat up. Check out the difference here.

There have been other skins in the past that react to damage–like Isaac Clarke, whose health bar flashes red, or Synth, whose jacket glitches out, or Spider-Punk, who flashes different colors–but they were temporary effects, not permanent ones. And we have several examples of the opposite thing, where a skin changes permanently when you get kills–like any of the Midas or Marigold skins that turn gold. The closest I’ve seen to the Five Nights at Freddy’s damage effect I know of for any Fortnite cosmetic is Botch, the Dumb Ways to Die backbling which becomes wounded when you lose HP. But in that case, the wounds are healed when you heal yourself.

The damage effect is a neat feature for these skins to have, since the beat-up versions of these animatronics are important pieces of imagery for the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, and this new type of reactivity is a very creative Fortnite way to bring both the clean and beat-up versions together.