Friday the 13th: The Game Review
Gaming in Spooky Season
I love the Halloween season. I love everything about it, from the horror movies to the window shopping in pop-up Halloween stores, to the yard decorating, to the costumes, to the perfectly chilled climate and fall leaves, and to the endless pumpkin spice flavored food we get every year.
While I’m a huge fan of classic horror movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th, I’m usually not one to play horror-related video games. There’s something unique about the medium that amplifies the scares akin to walking through your favorite haunted attraction of choice.
When you watch a horror movie, you’re passively participating in the action. You know it’s just a movie and can play games with your friends, guessing who will die next and cracking jokes at the misfortunes of the actors. In a game, however, you’re directly controlling the action onscreen, meaning everything you do could potentially lead to the killer or whatever monster there may be finding you.
In October of 2018, I received a digital copy of Friday the 13th: The Game for free as one of the benefits of being a PlayStation Plus subscriber. The premise seemed interesting enough, but, just like my experiences with Persona 5, it took me a couple of years after the initial purchase before I started playing.
Gameplay
Friday the 13th takes place at the iconic Camp Crystal Lake, and gameplay occurs roughly five minutes after Jason Voorhees makes himself apparent to the terrified camp counselors by brutally murdering one of them. You play as either Jason himself, or one of five other counselors.
If you’re playing as Jason, the objective is simple enough: kill all the counselors before they escape or call the police, and if you’re playing as one of the counselors, you have to work together to survive Jason’s attacks within the match’s time limit and/or escape.
Jason can sense if people are in buildings, can teleport to any location in the camp, and is equipped with a variety of different killing methods, unlockable by leveling up when you have the chance to play as him. However, he can be stunned by the counselors via gunshots, pocket knives, and other improvised weapons.
Since there are always five counselors and only one Jason, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be playing as a counselor most of the time. In the two or three hours of playtime completed, I only got to play as Jason once, and it was remarkably more fun than playing as a counselor.
Just like in the movies, Jason can’t die, making the camp counselor gameplay experience that much more stressful. Sure, you can stun him and eventually win the match by hiding and running out the clock or getting the police involved, but when you hear his trademark “ki ki ki ma ma ma,” an immediate sense of dread washes over you. It’s extremely difficult to win the match as the counselor team, and there was just one match where we “won.”
On the other hand, playing as Jason is a power trip. Being able to teleport to anywhere you want on the lake, smashing through doors, walking through walls, and executing counselors in over-the-top brutal ways is reminiscent of all the kills he performed in the movies.
Final thoughts
Friday the 13th: The Game feels like a one-trick pony. Every match starts with virtually the same cutscene of Jason killing a counselor, and then it’s a fight for survival as a counselor or a bloodbath as Jason.
There’s an incredible amount of work and detail that was put into this game. The different playable iterations of Jason and the camp counselors look almost exactly like their film counterparts. The kills reflect everything a Friday the 13th game should be.
The problem I see with it is the unavailability of playing as Jason and how different of an experience your game is while playing as a counselor. Even if you play as Jason, you’re eventually going to get tired of chasing people around the same map, and if you’re a counselor, you’ll quickly get turned off of being killed all the time.
The game is worth a shot if you’re a diehard Friday the 13th fan, but, in my opinion, the best Friday the 13th experience is on the silver screen.
