Friday the 13th: The Game

[Jason]

This game rapidly but quietly became one of my favorite video games ever made.

I was moderately intrigued when the game came out. Friday the 13th is my favorite movie franchise of all time and seeing it cross over into modern gaming definitely piqued my interest, but my total disinterest in fully online gaming gave me the impression that while I'll definitely pick the game up immediately upon its release, I would almost certainly limit myself to the smaller offline features only, just to see what the game had to offer. I was slow to start up the game because I knew with modern games that when a game is released, there are generally a lot of bugs that need to be worked on. So instead of popping it right in and experiencing tons of bugs and glitches out of the gate, I opted to wait a few months or a year so that way I would encounter less of these in my first impression.

I was at a friend's house party one night in July, 2018, about a year after the game came out, when we spontaneously decided to pop the game in and see what it had to offer. The offline mode is structured like many other games. You have to complete one map, do certain tasks and unlock things before you can continue to the next stage. You're pretty limited to what the game has to offer when you're just barely starting the offline campaign. Online mode is wildly different, however, and there are no maps you need to unlock. You can start an online match and all maps available in the game are at your disposal and can be chosen through whichever random player has control of the lobby. Catching a glimpse of this at that house party was the start of my journey with this game. An online match was started, and seconds into it I was hooked. Seeing the incredible design and unbelievable detail that the developers put into this game was something I never would have expected. I was by far the biggest fan of the movies at that party and while everyone was enjoying the shenanigans of the other players online and running from Jason, I was examining every detail of the design and seeing the smallest of details that showed me the developers of this game were as big of fans of this franchise as I am. I was off work with medical issues at the time that I had mentioned before, so I had nothing better to do but to sit back, collect disability for a few months and just play this game, and that's basically what I did.

Once I got home and got to play it on my own, I did both offline and online features. My main interest remained the same, which was unlocking the offline stages and collectibles. But having the freedom online to explore any map was something I was fully dedicated to, so I would go back and forth, trying to see all the maps that online had to offer, just so I could explore every tiny crevice of the game and see all the references to the movies. My beginner phase of the online campaign consisted of me waiting around in lobbies to explore every different map as a counselor. There are so many easter eggs in every map that only the die hard fans of the franchise would understand and it made me that much more invested in exploring. But you can't just explore the game without consequences. Jason is after you. And throughout my beginner phase, I never once tried to escape, call the police or fix a car. I simply avoided Jason at all costs just so I can explore the map. Over time, I got better and better at getting away and exploring the maps. Slowly but surely, without even realizing it, I began to learn what the main goals in this game were. Once I became fully familiar with all the maps in online mode, I was already a good player and simply became hooked on the gameplay. I couldn't believe I was an online gamer.

The main idea of the game is to repair cars/boats and find the fuse to call the police so you can escape from Jason. A match is 20 minutes long, and depending on how good the player is, if you aren't able to escape via car/boat/police, and just manage to survive all 20 minute to the end, you're basically a top-tier player. So much of my memory of this game is a blur, so I can't pinpoint how exactly I learned certain things, but at some point the realization kicked in that you can kill Jason. It's basically impossible if you don't know exactly what to do, but to make it even more difficult (yes, even more difficult), at least one other person (counselor) in your lobby needs to know exactly what to do as well. So in as brief of a rundown as I can, I'll explain the process.

An online lobby can have up to 8 players in total. One player will be selected randomly as Jason, the remaining players are counselors. If you want to kill Jason, there is basically a checklist of things that are needed, and also need to occur in a match:
• There needs to be a female counselor
• She has to remain alive throughout the match
• The radio tower needs to be found immediately and Tommy Jarvis needs to be called on it
• A player in the lobby must either die or escape so somebody can return as Tommy Jarvis
• The female counselor needs to obtain Pamela's sweater
• Tommy Jarvis needs to find an ax or machete as a weapon

If all these things occur and Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews) is on the map along with a female counselor, Jason can actually be killed. In a match, Jason spawns in his shack (which is identical to Friday the 13th part 2, mother's head and sweater in all). If you want to kill Jason, you basically need to combine the endings of part 2 and part 4. At any point in the match, the female counselor can go into Jason's shack, find his mother's sweater and put it on. This gives the female counselor one chance to stun Jason using the sweater. Using the sweater to stun Jason means that he will be in a trance like at the end of part 2 when Ginny is posing as Jason's mother. When Jason is stunned with the sweater, the female counselor is reciting the line "Jason, mother is talking to you. Put the weapon down and come to mommy". While the line is being recited, there is about a five-second maximum window where Jason needs to be knocked down to his knees somehow (if Tommy has the ax, this is perfect) and when he's on his knees, Tommy can deliver the killing blow, similar to the ending in part 4. The reason there is only a five second window is because the player who is operating Jason is prompted to tap X (PS4) repeatedly to fill the bar and try to get off his knees and back on his feet. If the player operating Jason taps X quickly enough and fills the bar before Tommy delivers the killing blow, you've failed. However, one thing to note is that throughout the match, Jason needs to take a lot of damage. You can knock him down briefly with blunt objects like bats, axes, and wrenches. The more damage he takes, the closer his mask comes to being knocked off. You have to knock his mask off before you can attempt a kill, or it won't work.

Once I discovered you can kill Jason and learned the process of doing so, I became hooked on this game in a way I've never been hooked on any game before. My time off from work was basically open-ended, I had no financial worries especially given that I was granted disability, I was single, no children, had nothing to do but play this game and that's basically what I did. This game was incredibly therapeutic during a time where the uncertainty of my medical situation and conditions were at their peak and causing me great stress. So I will forever be grateful of that. There were even a few days in there where I would wake up, play the game for 16 hours and go to bed. I was literally transfixed with this game in every sense of the word. In those extremely rare cases where I would encounter a fellow player who had the same goals and we actually managed to kill Jason, the dopamine hit was like nothing I'd ever felt in my adult life. It was like being a kid again and feeling the child-like sense of excitement you could only get in your youth. The process of working toward something so incredibly difficult and having it pay off was not only worth all those failed attempts at killing Jason, or settling with surviving/escaping, it made those moments even more enjoyable, because more than 99% of the time I was in a match, either nobody knew how or nobody tried to kill Jason.

Throughout countless hours of gameplay and familiarity, I developed my own system in the game that I have never seen implemented by any other player. If less than one percent of my time playing the game was actually spent in a match where I could kill Jason, then what the hell else was I doing? Well, I always played as a female counselor and selected perks that strengthened her weaknesses. I always grabbed Pamela's sweater, whether or not there was a chance of killing Jason. I'd spend my time harassing Jason, while side-stepping him and allowing him to attack and kill lesser players. When he'd be pre-occupied with other counselors, I would quietly stock up and hide blunt items in a pile (generally in the woods away from cabins) to use on Jason when the time would come. Eventually, in damn near every match, everyone was killed or some would escape, and it would come down to just me and Jason. Instead of trying to escape the map, I would really test my skills as a player and try to survive the remaining time to the end. I would slip through cabin windows, knock Jason down briefly with a weapon here, shoot him with a shotgun there, etc. Oftentimes I'd do enough damage on my own to knock his mask off. But once Jason takes a certain amount of damage, or once so much time has passed in the match, Jason will enter "rage mode". Once he enters rage mode, he cannot be knocked down with weapons and basically becomes an untouchable killing machine. But as I stated earlier, when you kill Jason, he can be stunned with the sweater, even in rage mode. When Jason was in rage mode and I was the only survivor left, I would slip in and out of cabin doors and windows and get him to follow me to my stash of blunt weapons. With Pamela's sweater still intact and Jason's mask off, I would use the sweater to stun Jason, quickly pick up one of the blunt weapons and hit him. When Jason is stunned with Pamela's sweater, the idea is to hit him with a blunt weapon once so he can drop to his knees allowing Tommy to deliver the killing blow. What I had discovered through countless hours of playing this game is that once Jason is stunned with the sweater, a blunt object can be used to hit Jason more than just once to drop him to his knees and the durability of the weapon usually lasts for about 2-5 blows depending on the weapon and the strength of your counselor. You also have to hit him quickly enough between each blow so that the player operating Jason cannot tap the X button quickly enough to escape the sweater stun. So without the ability to kill Jason, and a pile of several blunt objects in front of me, I would go to town hitting Jason until every weapon I stashed would break, or until time would run out and the game would end. There have been so many lobbies where I would do this, the match would end, the audio from everyone on the mic would come back on and the entire lobby would be howling with laughter. People would be praising me, sending me friend requests, private messages. It was almost as fun as killing Jason.

The reason I'm making this thread is because, tragically, the game will no longer be playable online at the end of 2024. So there are only a few months left to play it. I haven't got to play it as often over the last few years because of finding my wife and starting a family, but since I quit my trucking career and began pursuing something new, I've had a little bit more time on my hands and now that this game is ending, I've spent a fair bit of time refamiliarizing myself with this game and getting great at it again. The day this game goes offline is going to be a very sad day for me, so I'm getting in as much playing time as I can before I can no longer play it and it will only be a memory. If anyone has had this game in the back of their mind to play some time soon, it's basically now or never.