The Haunted Hoard: Friday the 13th (NES)
Horror movies certainly had bad luck getting adapted into video games during the early years of the medium, and while Halloween was so easy it was dull and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made your victims too difficult to catch, it was perhaps appropriate the game named for an unlucky day would turn out worse than the both of them. Friday the 13th on NES does try to be more accurate to the source material than the Commodore 64 game that first adapted the franchise, but that’s because that first game almost doesn’t read as much of an adaptation so having zombies run around the camp and the masked killer Jason Voorhees dressed in purple still qualifies as more accurate. Unfortunately one of the most accurate parts of this survival horror game though is having your chance at survival as a regular human against this seemingly unstoppable killer be remarkably low, but how much of that comes from Jason’s strength rather than poor game design is hard to say.
In Friday the 13th on NES the goal is to defeat Jason on three consecutive days while he is trying to wipe out all six playable camp counselors and the 15 children who are hiding in cabins out on the lake. Navigating Camp Crystal Lake to try and hunt him down is already a bit confusing since moving between spaces is presented in a side-scrolling format even though the map’s roads are mostly large loops, meaning even though you’re moving left and right you’ll be conceptually moving up and down a path instead. It’s also hard to gauge distance with your map, some cabins that look far apart actually able to show up on screen at the same time, so getting your bearings will likely require frequently consulting the map to understand where you’re even heading. Hunting down Jason early on would be a death wish though, the playable camp counselors having different advantages like movement speed and jump height but they all begin with only rocks to throw at Jason which have almost no hope of wearing him down. You’ll need to explore different areas around the camp site like the forest, caves, and cabins to start finding better attack options, but there are a few design ideas that make this process a confusing and overly difficult mess.
When you start the first day you’ll probably immediately hear an alarm go off that indicates Jason has found a victim and is working up to killing them. He can kill multiple kids in the cabins if he finds them and losing camp counselors will be a blow to your efficacy in later days, but if you do go to try and confront him you have to stand and face him and will likely lose your current counselor instead. To even have the time to start working on fighting back against Jason will require accepting some children or camp counselors will have to perish while you’re trying to get even the basics accomplished. As you travel you’ll need to worry about normal enemies first and foremost not only because they are constantly appearing, but defeating them is important to the process of actually becoming competent enough to face Jason. Zombies are constantly popping up out of the ground, these supposed former victims of Jason appearing in even greater numbers the later in the day it is. Luckily they are appropriately mindless and just try to walk towards you, and killing them is key to making items appear randomly in the air. Once you’ve killed a certain number of zombies, items have a chance of appearing when you leap about, this starting to grant you important items like the lighter, a knife for something a bit stronger to defend yourself, or keys used to access important spaces in interior areas.
The game tells you that your success will likely come from lighting fireplaces with your lighter around the cabins of the campsite, but really what’s more important is finding notes that don’t so much give you hints as actually trigger the appearance of certain items elsewhere. Items like the torch and pitchfork are the only tools that can deal damage to Jason in a reasonably quick manner and the conditions for finding them are difficult to discover and complete. Even if you do find a more middle of the road weapon like an axe or machete before then though, sometimes it might just be laying out on the floor inside a cave or cabin and it might not have even been there the last time you looked in that area. A small comfort is that most enemies are more time wasters than real threats, the player easily able to gauge when a bird will swoop and the actually dangerous wolves will only appear at night, a time when ideally you’ll be focused on hunting Jason instead of still collecting helpful tools. Jason’s mother is possible to fight in the form of her decapitated head that floats around in the air and she’s almost as dangerous as her son, but the rewards can at least be worthwhile despite seeking her out being almost as dangerous as confronting Jason.
When you enter certain interior spaces like cabins the game shifts from a side-scrolling perspective to something close to a first person view. Your character will be at the bottom of the screen and able to move forward a bit in the rooms, but you can turn around to view different areas of a room and scouring such places is often key to getting an item of any value. This format is also how you’ll be fighting people like Jason and his mother Pamela though, and these battles are heavily weighted against you. Jason especially is very fast and will go shuffling left and right at high speeds, stopping when he wants to punch you or hit you with a weapon he might have picked up in the later dates. Moving back and forth yourself may sometimes dodge a blow, but you’ll have to input diagonal directions instead for a proper dodge, leaning left or right to try and avoid the heavy damage he can easily dish out. Problem is, Jason might attack twice when he goes for you, the timing of the dodge just so that you’re likely to get hit by the second one and still take more damage than you’ll be able to deal while he’s in close. There is an exact moment when he’s about to hit you can do the dodge lean to avoid both, but your health is a commodity you can’t risk much in these fights, especially if you’re using a subpar attacking weapon. All of them are thrown when used so you can at least hit Jason when he’s backed up a bit and unable to hurt you, but especially in later days his speed reaches a point where you just need to hope you have the spot-on reflexes or you’ll end up losing a vital playable character.
Jason isn’t just fought once per day and beaten though. After taking a certain amount of damage he’ll disappear and then reemerge sometime later. This does give you some time to heal, although the vitamins you find with characters cannot be taken by them unless they were just about to die. Instead it is probably wise to find other counselors in cabins and pass your good weapon along to someone healthy, hoping maybe you’ll get some vitamins as them since you are allowed to heal characters you aren’t currently playing as. You can’t pass anything but your weapon of choice between counselors though and each person has to work themselves up the zombie-killing ladder to make new items appear, but dying as a counselor or picking up a new weapon will get rid of the weapon you were holding which can mean even after sacrificing other people’s lives just to get something that can dent Jason, a bad break can necessitate doing it all over again while no doubt losing more people. Items and deaths carry over across the three days, but there is at least a little mercy in that all the counselors are healed after a day ends. Something that fluctuates between a help and a hindrance though is Jason can sometimes be encountered during the side-scrolling camp exploration, still as speedy as ever and likely to deal a good bit of damage in a way that you can’t dodge since the screen locks in place when he shows up. You can also attack him much more easily if you meet him this way so if the counselor can survive the damage race, it’s much better than a confrontation in the cabins.
I have been essentially intertwining survival tips between the criticisms partly because I had to come out the other side to even be able to review the game, but learning the game’s peculiarities and rubbing up against its sloppy systems is a brutal process where logic doesn’t always feel applicable and the scales can feel tipped against you in ways that can doom you early on. Lose too many fast moving counselors and having a good weapon might not even help you. Follow the notes you find and you might still not have the time to spin around in every room to see if a useful weapon is laying around. Even understanding the timing on how to dodge Jason might not work out well if you are even the slightest bit inconsistent due to how the game manages health. Most of the normal enemies are more there to actually slow you down and life is too precious to risk an accidental hit since Jason can carve through your health bar so quickly. Even following the tips the game gives you isn’t much of a method to gain an edge since they leave out important details and conditions necessary to having a good shot at survival. While you could say there is a sense of helplessness appropriate to being one of Jason’s prospective victims, it’s an oppressive type where the masked killer is probably less terrifying than the idea of bumbling around the lake hoping you can figure out its confusing nature before everyone has died.
THE VERDICT: Friday the 13th takes a battle for survival and makes it into a needlessly confusing hunt for any hope of standing a chance against Jason. The world deliberately slows you down with constant mindless zombie encounters while whittling away your human resources, and if you aren’t spot-on when you do finally have the means to actually achieve the game’s goal of defeating Jason, you’ll experience even deeper setbacks. Success isn’t really about coming up with a decent strategy for beating Jason, your objective instead being to bumble around interacting with unexplained item triggers and less than helpful hint notes until you have a sufficient weapon for possibly wearing down the masked killer, but even turning the tables finally isn’t satisfying ultimately as the work involved getting there just isn’t worth it.
And so, I give Friday the 13th for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
An ATROCIOUS rating. If wandering around the campgrounds until you finally understood the world enough to potentially have a successful three day run was the only issue, the game would still be awful but not as bad as the game becomes when you factor in the form of the Jason fights. Survival hinging on a perfectly timed dodge you’ll need to do many times per confrontation, and with Jason disappearing and reappearing multiple times in a day as well, it furthers raises the likelihood of something going awry and you possibly losing your best counselor. Getting stuck with a slow counselor with a bad weapon will literally likely be a death sentence for some other people around the campgrounds, and fighting Jason with anything short of the best weapons that require some of the more arcane methods to find further makes survival unlikely. Hinging so much on these conflicts when they are designed not so much as entertaining skewed challenges but ways to quickly take out the player’s limited counselor count adds flash points of frustration to a game that is otherwise mostly dull and confusing. Slowly clobbering zombies so items can start appearing in midair so you can hopefully trigger unexplained conditions for better items elsewhere certainly doesn’t make the time you’re spending away from Jason compelling, and with Jason’s eagerness to hunt down your allies you’ll pretty much have to figure out the unusual interactions to have a chance of clearing all three days in a row without losing too many people. If there was some strategy or reasonable discovery involved in turning the tables on the imposing masked murderer then this format could be retooled into something that works, but your weakness here is less about feeling vulnerable and more a consistent sense of confusion.
Jason Voorhees doesn’t need to be surprisingly sprightly and supported by bad world design to be a terrifying menace, and if anything here he is upstaged by the game’s design mistakes in inspiring fear. Friday the 13th for NES is more of an anxious trudge than immersive horror, the player more worried about being screwed over and forced to repeat annoying processes. I tried not to just let this game’s infamy guide my opinion on it, but Friday the 13th is a game of constant concerns with unsatisfying resolutions, be it in the actual hunt to get what you need to succeed or actually facing down Jason in those conceptually basic but surprisingly demanding battles.