The Haunted Hoard: Friday the 13th: The Computer Game (Commodore 64)

Friday the 13th: The Computer Game, sometimes called simply Friday the 13th, is the first attempt to adapt the slasher movie franchise into a video game, but besides the gradual fade-in of Jason Voorhees’s mask that is used as an odd sort of timer, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the gameplay. The character meant to be Jason looks completely different from his film version and besides his desire to kill a bunch of people, he doesn’t even utilize familiar tactics to hunt down his victims. Remove the name and it might not even seem like this game was designed to be a Friday the 13th tie-in, but even if it has only a tenuous connection to its source material at its best, this action game’s quality is still going to come from its actual content rather than if it presents the antagonist properly.

 

Friday the 13th: The Computer Game nominally takes place at campgrounds near Crystal Lake, and the area where you can find a few archery targets at least speaks to some effort to make it match up with some locations seen in the film. This version of the area consists of 24 unique screens making up its exterior area, the player also able to enter a barn, church, or house that have large multi-screen interiors as well. You and ten other campers are set loose to wander around these areas in this single-player game, the AI players ambling about without much purpose but you are given a task: kill Jason before he can kill you. However, Jason Voorhees is not out in the open, instead assuming the form of one of the other campers. Your objective then is to find and test campers to see if they’re Jason, but he will drop his disguise when periodically he makes his move to kill someone. Oddly enough, the hulking masked killer is represented here as a rather normal looking man with black hair, black pants, and a black shirt. He can take on the appearance of women or the short young boys who roam around the camp though, so you’ll need to likely test everyone you come across and hopefully remember who you’ve checked before despite a few having only slight color differences to set them apart.

The actual way to try and check if someone is Jason is conceptually rather brutal. Using one of the weapons you can find just laying around the campgrounds, you need to hit the person and watch their reaction to find out if they’re really Jason. If that person you just swung an ax into flinches from the injury, they’re legitimate. If they briefly turn into the black-clothed figure meant to be Jason Voorhees though, you know you’ve found your target, and he often won’t even defend himself unless he’s triggered his killing period. There is really the only feasible way to test for Jason’s identity, although technically a more peaceful method of figuring him out would be to stalk a suspected camper when the music plays signifying Jason is on the hunt and waiting to see if he’ll make a move. This is hardly a viable tactic though, and with your points based on how many survivors are left when Jason is taken out, you’ll want to quickly find the killer and take him out before he gets to work. Luckily, everyone can survive a quick knife to the chest or chainsaw to the face, often multiple times, but too much aggression will eventually kill an innocent camper. Oddly enough there is no penalty besides missing out on the points that could have come from having that person survive, but with how quickly the campers run around, often near the edges of the screen to make hunting them down hard, you probably won’t enjoy an attempt to beat Jason to the punch on wiping out the campers.

 

One reason you don’t have to worry too much about roughing up the campers is that many of the randomly distributed weapons you find aren’t very strong and even hitting with many of them isn’t too easy. A knife has incredibly short range, the pitchfork requires your target to be right on the end of the tines to take damage, and the chainsaw even only lightly harms someone who is standing right where its teeth align when you lunge it out in front of you with more of a jabbing motion than a carving swing. Being a 2D game with simple sprites of course it can’t be too elaborate with how weapon attacks are represented, but some weapons do have more of a swing that allow you to hit people in a wider space than one perfect placement. The ax is actually quite good in terms of damage and reach, there also being a white line of a weapon that is likely mean to be a blade since it’s what Jason uses when he tries to attack people. These two tools are far superior to anything else you can find, even the throwing weapons that could let you harass Jason from afar if he is trying to kill you often very weak and thus taking a long time to finally put your target down. With the ax or blade though, a few swings will put the killer down and award you your points for however many people survived alongside you.

 

While having most of the weapons be so weak you won’t even want to use them is a shame, it does lead to a play style that makes Friday the 13th: The Computer Game somewhat tolerable. When a round starts, you bolt off to explore the campgrounds, looking for one of the useful tools so you can start testing the identities of your fellow campers. In a pinch you may scoop up something weaker, but that hunt for an ax or blade incentivizes some early exploration and gives Jason time to rev up for his first hunt. When you do have a decent attacking weapon, then you begin your own hunt, finding every unique camper you can to smack and see if they turn into Jason. Eventually, you’ll find him and can get to work putting him down for good, a round often not taking all that long. In fact, this style of play that is seemingly encouraged by the game’s design does make some other mechanics feel pointless. The timer represented as the hockey mask gradually appearing will likely never get far enough to be a concern, the same being true of the fear level represented by a blond character’s face in the bottom right. It’s hard to figure out what may increase your fear level, and even if you do find the face has their hair standing on end, it still isn’t likely you’ll experience any sort of impediment or failure state from it.

There is some useful info in the bottom area of the screen though, the ten other campers shown and when they die, even if you can’t confirm their death, they’ll be replaced by a tombstone. No matter where you are when Jason kills someone you will hear a shrill scream, but sometimes when you wander into a room with a corpse you may see a very detailed image of either someone having their head cut into by a blade or a selection of bloody skulls. It’s hardly effective horror, the image not surprising enough and not really representing a danger to you since Jason has often scampered away from the scene of the crime long before you find a body, but if you are lucky it might be a situation where the kill happened indoors so you can always scurry to the single exit and check anyone who tries to leave as a more reliable identity checking method. It will likely be more a matter of trying to tag everyone with a weapon instead of actually using any clues to find Jason, and other attempts to add some depth like a cross that prevents campers in the room besides yourself from being killed by Jason also feel too shallow to have an interesting effect on the game, especially since safe campers decide to amble out of the safe zone eventually.

 

The game’s small efforts to add a little horror the action are undermined quite a bit by a rather goofy soundtrack. Different areas will trigger public domain music to start playing, the choices not often fitting in the slightest. The Teddy Bears’ Picnic plays on the forest screens, Old McDonald Had a Farm kicks off when you’re in the barn, and the church has the Wedding March at times. Some spaces do have some ominous music, but the music often carries on even once you’ve left an area so you can be trying to find Jason out in the woods to a rendition of a kid’s song where no effort was made to make it sound spooky.

 

You will get to play as five different campers yourself, starting with a man named Gerry King and moving along to the next camper of the five as you win rounds before it loops back to the first camper, but if you do die yourself, an attempt to continue forces you back to Gerry. The person you play as does have some impact on how things unfold, mainly because they have different amounts of health, the two lady campers in particular far likelier to get killed if Jason feels like retaliating while you hunt him down. Considering the game isn’t too difficult otherwise since it’s mostly a violent scavenger hunt with moving targets though, it is nice there is at least a little difficulty variation and an incentive to run from Jason sometimes if you’re stuck as someone who might not be able to stand in place trading slashes with Jason in a worst case scenario.

THE VERDICT: It’s easy to exaggerate how bad Friday the 13th: The Computer Game is because of how much it departs in concept and appearance from its source material, but trying to hunt down the imposter among the other campers is a simple and speedy form of play so it doesn’t really deserve too much hate. It is still poorly designed, smacking people with a weapon until you find the one you actually need to kill isn’t a very compelling gameplay style, but there is at least a little bit of life in the process of hunting Jason down. You need to find a weapon that actually works well and deals enough damage you don’t spend forever trying to wear down Jason and then you start chasing down everyone to attack them as a test of their authenticity, there not really being much to the process once you understand it’s the way you need to play. It may not be thrilling, difficult, or scary, but it at least gives you something simple to occupy your time despite that activity being rather bland.

 

And so, I give Friday the 13th: The Computer Game for Commodore 64…

A BAD rating. While a licensed product should at least try and feel like it’s actually related to the material it shares a name with, Friday the 13th: The Computer Game, when viewed independent of any associations with a franchise, is just a pretty poor attempt to make a game about hunting down a secret killer. Being able to check the identities of people so easily and without the player being punished for stabbing innocent people so flippantly means there’s not enough thought to the action you’re performing in this hunt for a hidden Jason, but there’s no other system in place to check them so it would take quite a retool to move away from this methodology. Jason himself could do with a bit more aggression if he’s been revealed and it would be nice if you could utilize other weapons rather than trying to hunt down the few that can end Jason swiftly without experiencing the woes of bad hit detection. The hunt isn’t lifeless though because the space is large enough to spread out the campers and lead to potential losses as Jason finds others before you find him, the process not quite captivating though because it’s often going to unfold rather similarly. Friday the 13th: The Computer Game can only really be approached with one strategy and so the idea falls apart, but if there was more thought into actually tracking the hidden killer down, maybe this idea could work regardless of whether or not it matches Voorhees’s usual modus operandi.

 

Friday the 13th: The Computer Game won’t be pleasing people with its gameplay, and while fans of a franchise are often willing to forgive design flaws for a chance to experience their beloved media, the departures from the source material will likely make them resent this game instead. Still, its design could have been compelling if it wasn’t so poorly realized, trying to hunt down the disguised murderer before he can kill again a sound idea for an action game. With how mindless the process can be in the form it takes here though, it certainly won’t earn forgiveness for failing to accurately capture the series’s identity.