3. Friday The 13th: The Game
Other than Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, I have never gotten into an online multiplayer game. They always seemed so toxic based on comments from friends who did play them, and I'm certainly below whatever gaming skill threshold exists above which people won't grief you when you screw up (if such a threshold even exists), and frankly I'm very fragile and just thought it was best I avoid it altogether.
I have no idea why I decided to give this game a crack. Actually, that's not true; I do know: It had been out for a few months and was half price in a Steam sale, and I love love love horror films and '80s aesthetics, so I figured if it was totally miserable that I would just move on after a few matches.
I was completely unprepared for how fun this game would be, how much I'd enjoy playing it, how much I'd want to play it, and actually meeting some cool people who also play it.
So here's how this works: A single match may last up to 20 minutes and consists of a maximum of eight players. Seven players are camp counselors, and one is Jason Voorhees. The counselors' objective is to escape, and Jason's objective is to kill all the counselors.
Counselors work toward escape by repairing various objectives. You might try to get a battery, gas, and keys to a car, for example, and then drive yourself and a handful of passenger counselors out of the camp. You might try to repair a phone and alert the police, then safely make it to them once they arrive. You might try to repair a boat and then safely speed away from the camp.
Most of this legwork is done in cabins placed around the camp, searching through various desks and chests of drawers looking for car keys, the phone box fuse, or other helpful items that may help temporarily fend off Jason.
And you must look very carefully, because some of the key repair items are found in various spots on the floors of the cabins and they can be easily missed if you aren't paying close attention.
Meanwhile, Jason is using a toolkit of supernatural abilities to hunt your asses down, including teleporting around the map, zipping around invincibly at high speed for a short time, and "sensing," which makes all nearby counselors glow bright red.
And as would be fair and expected in a 7-vs-1 situation, Jason is a heck of lot more powerful than the counselors, so once he catches up to you, your odds of survival are not great.
If you're thinking by now "Well it seems like the best thing to do if you're a counselor would be work with the other counselors, right?" Yeah! You're right! And one thing I've loved about this game is that even if there are people acting weird or straight-up cheating in matches here and there, most people who play this game also want to survive the night and work together. I've run into my share of griefing assholes, sure, but I've run into far more people who helpfully tell you what cabins they've already searched, or notice that you're playing as a weaker/slower character and will run objectives for you so you don't have to endanger yourself. I've also run into people who were very clearly new, and they have almost always been willing to listen and learn and stick with me so we can make it out together.
From a fanboy perspective, the attention to detail put into the maps is astounding. They're all based on the real settings of the first six movies, and the creators went to great lengths to study them and translate them to this game. It never felt like authenticity had to be sacrificed for playability, either, which is a true testament to how correct they got it.
You also have a slew of Jasons and counselors to play as, each with different stats and abilities and customizations, which really makes the gameplay varied and continuously fun. For example, the friends that I play with know that I like to play as Deborah and AJ, who are both very slow and weak but with very high stealth and repair abilities, so they often play as faster, heartier characters so that we complement each other in useful ways.
Tommy Jarvis is here too! By completing an objective on the map that calls him, one of the first two players to die will return as Tommy, who has maxed out stats and is supposed to help the other counselors escape. If you're feeling particularly confident, he is also the only path to killing Jason, which involves the risky process of finding Jason's cabin hidden somewhere on the map, having a girl counselor grab and wear his mom's sweater, pummeling him with the game's weak weapons enough times to remove his mask, then using the sweater to stun him, and having Tommy finish him off with either an axe or a machete. I've only pulled this off with others a handful of times, but boy does it feel amazing when you do.
I've had countless hours of fun in this game over the last year and a half, and also make a couple of great friends in-game (Hi Jayce! Hi Josh!). It's a shame that an ongoing legal battle kinda halted things in their tracks, because I think the momentum would otherwise still be churning. It still received a Switch port, and the game is still active, so I guess I'll just keep playing and holding out hope that the lawsuit gets resolved.
