Let’s start with the basics. Friday the 13th is a 1989 NES game published by LJN (the notorious company at least partially responsible for some of the worst NES games ever made) but actually developed by Atlus: the studio that would go on to develop the Person series and many other noteworthy games. Atlus also developed an adaptation of The Karate Kid for NES, which was actually the first licensed video game that LJN published and a kind of harbinger of the titles that would eventually define that company’s legacy.
The game itself sees you swap between six camp counselors as they do all of the things that suck about being in a Friday the 13th film (running from Jason, trying to save the campers, and dying) and none of the things that seem to keep people coming back to Camp Crystal Lake (sex, drugs, and watching Crispin Glover dance). Each counselor has their own unique stats and inventories, and if one of them dies, they’re gone forever.
You’ve probably already guessed that your main goal is to defeat Jason, but the bulk of the game is actually spent wandering around the camp, fighting various minor enemies (wolves, zombies, crows, and bats), and trying to collect the supplies and weapons that you’re absolutely going to need if you want to put Jason down long enough to give someone the time they need to write a new screenplay that helps justify why the horniest youths in America are willing to return to this epicenter of violence and horror: New Jersey.
I know that’s not a lot of information to go off of, but in order to accurately recreate the experience of playing Friday the 13th, you first need to be deprived of as much basic information as possible.
See, some fans like to call Friday the 13th a “hard” game, but it’s far more accurate to describe it as “confusing.” The game’s instruction manual presents itself as a detailed description of the experience (it even tells you to press Start to start the game, in case you didn’t know), but all but the most in-depth modern guides will leave you woefully unprepared for even the game’s most basic progression elements.
It starts with navigation. There’s a very good chance that most people who played this game at a young age will vividly remember the first time they tried walking right only to look at their map and discover that they’ve actually been moving to the left the entire time. Part of the problem here is that the vast majority of the map consists of loops that are inherently difficult to navigate, but so far as I can tell, there’s no actual explanation for why the game works that way besides the most likely possibility that it’s simply broken.