Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th: The Game’s horror comedy is at its best when the mics are on and everyone’s playing along.
Friday the 13th is improv, except the ‘yes, and-ing’ tends to end with a hole in your chest. One player is cast as Jason Voorhees, while seven player-controlled campers scramble to escape death at his hands. Die early on, and you become an audience member watching Jason tear the other players apart. The waiting isn’t painful, so long as a clever Jason is still tormenting the survivors while you cheer them on. You do need a good Jason, though.
When I’m the killer, my goal is not just catch to the campers, but to appear at the worst moment—to startle a group and snatch away their hope, to taunt them with axe wounds in cabin doors. Friday the 13th’s local voice chat is vital to its fun. I once overheard Jason taunting a camp counselor who he’d backed into a cabin. I bolted in just before he made his kill and whacked him with a wrench, stunning the masked killer long enough for us to quickly escape. “Oooh, shit!” he squealed as my fellow survivor sang, “Laaater, bitch.”
The moment would’ve been emptier with mics off. Without laughter in the darkness, Friday the 13th feels meaner and more frustrating. It’s a rare game that’s more fun to play with streamers, because I know their goal is to entertain as they’re being chased. Friday the1 3th is a great social experience. It’s buggy, it needs more maps and some rounds entirely suck, but the good rounds are amazing fun.
The counselors’ goal is to escape, or survive until the round ends. The common methods are to repair a car or boat, which requires finding items in the cabins and completing timing-based minigames. It takes teamwork as one player can’t carry a battery and fuel at the same time, and it’s unlikely that they’d find both on their own anyway. It’s an alliance which falls apart when Jason appears, and then reforms as players return to their tasks.
When no one’s working together, rounds can be painful. But in the middle of one match, which I thought was going terribly, a survivor jogged up to me and said, “Find the machete! Let’s kill Jason!” We didn’t kill him—it is possible, just hard—but the sudden camaraderie as four of us ran from his hulking frame in search of the last puzzle piece turned objectiveless wandering into a horror movie. The fun requires that you play along. As Jason, I once cornered a player early in a match, and as he protested, “It’s so early in the game!” we came to an unspoken understanding: Knife duel. After whacking my head, he ran into a cabin and locked the door. I teleported away (Jason has abilities which can be used more frequently as a match progresses) to find someone else. There isn’t much joy in ending someone’s round early, and on top of that the pressure is always on— if I’m busy breaking down a door, I know another survivor is across the map trying to repair the boat.
Hokey mask
The best moments tend to come near the end of the match—for example, three counselors are piled into a car, and I’m chasing them, listening as they yell directions and smash the car into a tree. A wild, unstable car at that. It’s getting better with patches, but Friday the 13th is still buggy. Sometimes I get locked into a run speed when walking, and it’s awkward to orient myself and swing a wrench where I want to swing it. It’s clunky, though that sometimes contributes to the comedy.
Fresh environments with new escape methods feel essential, though, as I’m tiring of the three campgrounds, which stay true to the films, but are hard to distinguish from one another. The developer probably has more planned, but what’s there now is still fun with the right group—and I haven’t even covered all tactical considerations, such as managing fear, or using radios to trick Jason into thinking a room contains a counsellor. At $40 it isn’t a steal, but for chatty entertainers who enjoy multiplayer storytelling over technical perfection, Friday the 13th can be thrilling and hilarious.
Without laughter in the darkness, Friday the 13th feels meaner