Drown him, stab him, blow him to smithereens: Hard as you try, you can’t kill Jason Voorhees. But while death may forever elude the hulking, murderous mama’s boy in the hockey mask, it’s coming fast for the recent video game based on his big-screen rampages. The janky but oddly addictive Friday the 13th: The Game goes offline for good at the end of the year — an ignoble but perhaps inevitable fate for an interactive slasher that’s been plagued by problems since its rocky launch in 2017.
Originally developed under the title Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp, before director Sean Cunningham granted the creative team a license he would lose in a lawsuit brought by screenwriter Victor Miller shortly thereafter, Friday the 13th: The Game put an asymmetric multiplayer spin on survival horror. It’s like Dead by Daylight with more bozo personality. One player takes control of Jason. Up to seven others play as the promiscuous jocks, babes, and nerds he has to hunt down and dismember. Jason has a bunch of powers, including the ability to mysteriously teleport across the map, suddenly appearing behind or in front of his fleeing prey. The counselors have … flashlights and cardigans.
Right from the jump, the game had enormous issues, to the point where some of the more withering reviews complained that it had been released in an unfinished state. Servers couldn’t accommodate the volume of interested players, which initially resulted in very long wait times to get into a match; once you finally did, you could be booted without warning. The player base was heavy on griefers and trolls; the developers had to 86 friendly fire early on to stop people from simply attacking their teammates like copycat Jasons. Glitches were numerous and sometimes hilarious. One popular hiccup allowed counselors to phase onto the roof of a lodge, where they could just run down the clock while Jason impotently circled on the ground below.
As fan service, though, Friday the 13th is amazing. From the maps closely modeled on locations from the movies (down to little reproduced quirks of the production design) to that old familiar ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma leitmotif, the game was meticulously made in the image of its cinematic ancestors. Publisher Gun Interactive consulted and involved multiple veterans of the franchise: Original composer Harry Manfredini worked on the soundtrack, frequent man behind the mask Kane Hodder posed for the kill animations, and makeup wizard Tom Savini was brought in to design one of the multiple, playable iterations of Jason. When you switch on the radio in the car, it plays another ode to the IP: “Friday the 13th,” by the Misfits. More than most licensed game adaptations, this one really plops you into the world of the series, albeit a cartoonish version starring boardwalk caricatures of its horny teen heroes.
If you can accept the dodginess of the mechanics — arguably a feature as much as a bug in survival horror, where combat and evasion is supposed to be perilous — Friday the 13th can be a blast. Unless you’re very good or very lucky, you die a lot. That’s built into the gameplay, which deliberately stacks the deck against the counselors while still giving them multiple pathways to unlikely victory. No match is the same because the game randomly scrambles the placement of items on the map, forcing you into punishing scavenger hunts. You learn to accept the very real possibility of losing and to appreciate times when you almost win. Life as a Crystal Lake counselor is short, cheap, and cruelly pointless.
Playing as Jason is another story. There’s a real learning curve to mastering his wealth of powers and to working around the built-in limitations of controlling a hulking instrument of death. (Most of the Jasons you can choose from aren’t exactly swift or limber.) Get the hang of it, and Friday the 13th becomes a dark power trip. Fail to, and it becomes a horror comedy of errors, a slapstick farce at your expense. There’s no shame in dying as a puny counselor, hopelessly unmatched by a supernatural serial killer. But getting clowned on (and tea-bagged) by your victims? That hurts.
The game is fun to watch, too. The consolation for getting decapitated or eviscerated by Jason is that you suddenly gain control of a surveillance system, allowing you to toggle between the remaining players. It’s almost like being reincarnated as the director of a Friday the 13th sequel, tilting the camera around each survivor, crosscutting between them, becoming a morbid voyeur. That, too, is very much in the spirit of the series, which has always blurred the line between the killer’s homicidal POV and the bloodthirsty spectatorship of those in the audience.
True to its source material, Friday the 13th: The Game is usually funnier than it is scary. But it can certainly be stressful, too. To escape by car, you have to find the battery and the gas can and the keys, and Jason might still pop up in front of you and shut down the engine mid-drive by slamming his fists on the hood. Get the boat running, and you can only pray like hell Jason doesn’t catch you in the act, because it’s one button to send you careening into the water, where you’re truly a sitting duck. Every match is its own race against the odds, a series of parallel or intersecting suspense sequences. These games of cat and mouse were the reason to keep playing, even when Friday the 13th seemed hellbent — through clunky controls or catastrophic connection failures or the empowerment of trash-talkers — on driving you away.
Make no mistake, Friday the 13th is a flawed game, some would say a downright misbegotten one. No amount of patches ever entirely smoothed out its kinks. But neither did those issues kill the lizard-brain fun of this Kickstarter’d labor of love, which was made in the trashy, gory-funny spirit of the ’80s bloodfests that inspired it.
You could even say the game took the communal experience of watching a dopey horror movie and made it truly interactive. With the right group, it could be as stupidly blissful as marathoning the F13 movies and shouting heckling instructions at the dipshits onscreen. Except in this case, it’s your friends futilely hitting Jason with a baseball bat or “escaping” out of a second-story window or slowly crouch-walking through the woods toward uncertain salvation. Gather them close today. Once this game goes down, no amount of lightning or telepathy is bringing it back.
