Surviving a match of Friday the 13th: The Game takes strategy, survival is at stake, but even the best tactics break at the tip of Jason Voorhees’ spear — so long as there’s someone worthy to wield it.
Despite the flare guns and bear traps, the running and the screaming, playing Friday the 13th: The Game often starts methodical. There are many ways to escape Jason Voorhees’ killing floor, but the cars and calls for help all require fulfilling specific objectives. But that scavenger hunt groove — fortifying cabin doors, searching drawers, managing fear —can only end one way. Friday the 13th: The Game Executive Producer Randy Greenback put it best: “Jason shows up and it’s just a giant clusterfuck.”
Jason specializes in turning the counselor’s greatest victories to ash. Successfully gas, repair and drive off with a car full of friends, but don’t be surprised when Jason drives you off the road into a tree. You’ve driven everyone to their deaths. “ That’s one of the things that’s great about asymmetric multiplayer,” Greenback said, “the idea is it should be hard. Jason is OP.”
“To be a better Jason you have to get in the mindset of Jason,” Greenback said. Like the acts invisibly dividing the plot of a movie, a Friday the 13th match has phases of play, wherein it pays to follow certain strategies. Greenback recommends taking a cue from the slasher series. In Friday the 13th Part 3, Jason spends the beginning of the movie watching people from the woods, picking off stray bikers or anyone foolish enough to wander too far away from the Higgins Haven house.
“At the beginning of the match everyone is running around doing stuff. You want to pop around the map and increase everybody’s fear,” Greenback said. “If you just chase after one counselor and you get hellbent on killing one person, everyone else is organizing and escaping.”
Rather than dropping bodies, Jason should focus on harassment, breaking up repair gangs and forcing the counselors to spread like cockroaches before you. “You want to make it harder for them to get any inertia in their goal of escaping,” Greenback said. “When you’re more powerful as Jason you can pick them off easier.”
Developer Illfonic and publisher Gun Media have already announced a single-player mode, expected later this summer, which will nurture players’ killer instincts, doubling as a boot camp for better Jasons. “When you start one of the single-player missions as Jason you’ll be dropped into a mini-sandbox where things are already happening. Counselors will be going about their activities and doing stuff. You’ll have to figure out how you’re going to approach and how you’re going to kill them,” Greenback said. “It’s kind of like playing a miniature Hitman mission, if you will, from the viewpoint of a slasher.”
Friday the 13th: The Game is likely to grow and change in small ways as well. For now the developers are addressing matchmaking issues with a series of patches and bug fixes — “It’s still crunch time. We’re still busting ass,” Greenback said — but new multiplayer content, including maps, Jasons and counselors, is on the way.
“There’s a lot of cool locations in the films,” Greenback said. “We’ve only hit three of them so far, so there are other places to go.” Maybe we’ll soon be dying at Camp Forest Green, the Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives summer camp, situated on a renamed Crystal Lake. Or young Tommy Jarvis’ house from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Or even that goddamn boat from Part 8. But no matter where the counselors bodies are piled, it always come down to the fear Jason can strike in his prey.
Some players have even begun reaching outside the mechanics of the game, indulging their inner psychopaths and psychologically tormenting their foes through the VOIP channel. Sound in Friday the 13th has a fall-off range, so when you hear the sound of Tiny Tim singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” a particularly sadistic Jason might be near. “People are so fucking creative,” Greenback said. “They do crazy stuff you never dreamed they’d do.”
