Disposable Teens: Friday The 13th - The Game
Tom Savini's Kill Montage
The latest video for Friday The 13th: The Game [official site] is a montage of gruesome kills. You've got fireplace roasting, knife down the throat, limb-lopping bleed-outs, chopping and hacking, eye-popping, skull-crushing (multiple), pitchfork-puncturing (with prolonged eye contact up until the moment of death) and a pickaxe coming down hard on a plaid shirt. That's not all and you can watch the whole thing below if it's the kind of thing that might perk you up on a Monday morning.
Just in case the intro text wasn't clear, this is a three minute video of people being murdered. There's no context, other than the title, setting and characters, and there are bits of blood, brain and bone all over the show. I'd say the lack of any build-up makes the whole thing seem more grotesque than it might if you were playing the game. It's a pinch of digital snuff, designed - I'm told - by special effects maestro Tom Savini.
It's the sound effects that took some of these from gruesome to uncomfortably brutal for me. I winced. And yet, I was also disappointed that there isn't a single decapitation because that seems like such an important part of the series' staple diet. Maybe there'll be a separate decapitation montage next month.
The game received crowdfunding via Kickstarter late last year and this is the first time we've commented on it since, so here's a little pre-alpha footage to go along with the kills.
It's a multiplayer game, in which you play either as a potential victim or as Jason.
The entire focus of Friday the 13th: The Game is multiplayer. Survival is entirely up to you, the player, as you either stealthily hide from Jason or work together as a team to escape or bring the fight to Jason. Playing as a counselor is all about risk and reward, giving players multiple means of triumph over Jason! Want to hide in the woods as you wait for the police? Perhaps you want to band together and try to take on Jason as a group? Maybe you and a friend decide to fix the boat on the lake and escape while leaving everyone else to their fate? There are endless opportunities to survive the night, but every choice has a consequence.
I can't help but feel this was beaten to the punch (someone is actually decapitated by a punch in Friday The 13th Part VIII; his head lands in a dumpster) a little when Dead by Daylight came along. They're similar in theme and setup, but Friday the 13th sounds more interesting, on paper at least, thanks to the various methods of escape and survival listed. Dead by Daylight, in my very limited experience of it, works with a very tight set of rules that the slasher theme hangs on loosely, whereas this might be a more chaotic simulation of lakeside slaughter.