The origins of the slasher film genre often seem to be attributed to plays performed at the Grand Guignol in the 1890s, sparking a trend of using violence as a selling point that crept into the film industry by the 1910s. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho getting a few people into clear shower curtains is sometimes seen as a face of the genre.
Psycho - 1988 - DOS 2.0, C64
The 1960 movie introduced many to the Bates Motel that you investigate in the 1988 game where, despite movement being a bit slow in some versions, it is easy to navigate, having real-time gameplay in a full-on investigation. I’m not normally into higher-level environmental puzzle games, but this is a quick one with real-time combat, so my interest was more piqued. I just wish there was more music to set the mood while investigating.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 1983 - VCS
This must be one of the most iconic slasher movies. Seeing a group of people on a road trip approach a house with gas-powered generators to attempt to barter for gas, only to find it’s occupied by a grave-robbing family who attack them, with one brother being someone who wears a mask of skin. In the 1983 game, you play as this brother, chasing down the tourists on your property before running out of gas, and revving that chainsaw causes gas to really drain, so there’s a bit of resource management with 1,000 points awarded for everyone you kill and more fuel awarded for every 5 people. It gets old immediately for me. I can tell it’s going for simple amusement, but it’s not something that I find amusing for long. People often attribute the game’s lack of impact to the controversial nature of the game’s content, but I’m unconvinced of that. I just see another movie tie-in game at a time people felt burned by them. Usually something being controversial leads to it becoming forbidden fruit that sells more, which is why companies will sometimes try to create negative attention to take advantage of the rebellious nature of humans in making their game seem more like forbidden fruit. This makes it unreliable to believe someone saying backlash happened without seeing the actual backlash for yourself, and it seems suspiciously hard to find that for 1983’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre compared to other games. If you ask me, it comes off as a scapegoat for the game not catching on.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 2006 - J2ME
This game would expand the gameplay loop by having multiple platforming levels to get through with power-ups to obtain and enemies that are armed to fight back.
Hold on a second….
If the switch 2 is considered 10th gen then….
checks retro shop sorted by new releases
oh… XboxOne/PS4 games in the retro sections now…
You know, for me, a game released today for the Atari 2600 isn’t a retro game. It’s just for a retro console, but I have seen to many; a retro game just means it’s for a retro system. Well, if you go by that rule…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 2023, Aug 18 - PS4/5, XboxOne/Series, Windows 10
A prequel to the 1974 movie, this is a competitive team vs. team multiplayer game where one team is the combat-focused family and the other, their stealth-focused captors.
Alright. I’m yanking your chain.
The year after this game, a Halloween game would be announced, and it wouldn’t be the first time a Texas Chainsaw game was followed by a Halloween game.
Halloween - October 1983 - VCS
“A homicidal maniac has escaped from a mental institution. On Halloween night, the killer returns to his hometown to wreak havoc! You are babysitting for a family in a large, two-story house. Somehow the vengeful murderer has gotten inside! Can you protect the children and yourself from the fury of his knife?”
Now this game holds my interest much longer. It’s not the kind of game I’d play regularly, but with its more complex loop and factors, I find it intriguing to pick up every once in a while. You’re to lock as many children as possible in safe rooms, with every 5 children increasing the difficulty…and the children can meet a gruesome end, alongside yourself, who has 3 lives. You can find a knife to go on the offense, forcing the unwanted guest to retreat. It seems to lodge into him each time as it leaves your hands, and you can find it tossed somewhere else as after he retreats with it in him. I will also say, though, the music blasting whenever he’s on screen gets old quickly. Perhaps for pure balancing, you can’t hold a knife while leading a child. On top of all this, as the manual says, “Beware of electrical blackouts on the upper level, for the house is old and the wiring is faulty. At any moment, you may find yourself plunged into dankness with the killer in pursuit!” Halloween is often lumped in with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the finger for it not catching on, being blamed on controversy, which similarly strikes me as a scapegoat given the reputation of VCS movie games a month after Atari’s trip to the landfill.
Michael Myers Rampage - 2007 - Flash 9
Michael Myers Rampage really nails simplicity. You simply try to successfully stab different people trying to dodge your attacks without being able to run away, as they are in various cornered situations, like waking up in bed to you standing over them. What ties it all together is the stopwatch, making the goal of the game to set the shortest time, turning what could have been a less satisfying version of Desktop Destroyer into a rapid, competitive challenge that doesn’t give you time to take in more than the visceral action you’re trying to commit.
Investigating Domark’s Claim
In 1985, Jeremy Spencer of Crash Magazine reported that Friday the 13th: The Computer Game would be based on the second movie but also said the first movie took place in the 1950s. Perhaps he was told this by Mark Strachan of Domark, who walked him through the game, as the manual also implies this:
Now this diverges from the movie, where there is around a 20-year gap between Jason drowning in the 1950s and his mother finally meeting her end to one of her victims finally getting the better of her. This survivor is rescued from a boat floating across the lake, where it is implied she dreamed of a decayed child-Jason, pulling her under. This is even reiterated in the second movie before she meets her end to a mysterious adult home invader, and it cuts to 5 years after the first movie, where the camp has since been condemned, marked off limits by law, becoming the horror story of “Camp Blood.” But when another camp is opened connecting to the same lake, some couldn’t help their curiosity and, in visiting the abandoned location, seem to disturb an adult male who has been squatting there that begins picking them off. Having spent the movie spooking each other with campfire stories, they assume this to be Jason, who survived and somehow managed to avoid being found by his obsessed mother for 20 years. This is an important divergence because those 20 years of Pamela living obsessed with her late son don’t occur in the game’s timeline, and the game implies the child Jason rising was no dream but an actual zombie who can age!
Before the later movies retroactively added that Jason was always undead, the original trilogy portrayed him as just a deformed man who took campy amounts of punishment before finally meeting his end to close off the trilogy, but despite not saying zombie, they did briefly explore the supernatural resurrection idea to bring him back one more time in the fourth movie before passing the torch, so the game doesn’t beat the movies to the idea but fleshes out its own version, and I assume did so retroactively from the game itself being finished to match the movies backtracking their moving on from Jason as well. The sixth movie had a bolt of lightning strike his grave to bring him back as the decayed powerhouse zombie who can no longer run that he’s known for and came out the same summer as the game, who would’ve known the discourse around the fifth and maybe even early rumblings about the sixth movie’s intentions. I think Jeremy was lied to. The hockey mask wasn’t even in the second movie, and I don’t think Jason is in this game at all. I suspect they changed the text in the manual without changing the game itself, as it seems to be based on the fifth movie about how the impact Jason left was inspiring copycats, visually distinct from him by having blue chevrons instead of red; what the game seems to actually be.
Friday the 13th: The Computer Game – Summer 1986 – C64, CPC, ZX Spectrum
You’re a group of 10, visiting the infamous Camp Crystal Lake; when unpacking, you find a bloodstained hockey mask among YOUR group’s luggage. One of you is a Jason copycat…but who? A murder mystery where you explore the area that notably has no lake, trying to find out who of your group is the killer and getting them before all of you are got. Technically you can be a Jason copycat yourself if you decide to just get all your own friends and you are the one with the mask… a blue chevroned mask of a copycat representing your sanity that seems to result in a jumpscare hallucination if too low on top of drawing attention to you as the person playing Jason will target whoever is the most panicked. Each round is won by getting the Jason Copycat or, I guess, even rival Jason Copycat. There’s a gathering mechanic where you can tell people not to split up and instead bunker down in the church while you look for others. They’ll get bored or antsy and eventually venture out. If you accidentally tell whoever in your group is a Jason copycat, he or she will arrive and strike there, causing everyone to notice the body and likely scatter. It appears you are the one in 9 with the courage to fight back in the heat of the moment if you choose to. There are 5 levels with you assuming the role of different members of the friend circle, but most seem to remember this game for either having blood capsules that I’m not sure would still be good to put in your mouth or for having the most generic royalty-free music, from Old McDonald to the most stereotypical song in all of horror, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
Nintendo of America's 6-Year Policy
Whenever I see the title screen of Friday the 13th for the NES, I think of the fear and awe I always heard people describing they had as kids about it. It was this forbidden adult horror game even though it came at a time when, in the absence of the ESRB to shield them from the backlash of offended passersby, Nintendo of America was far more censorship-heavy in being overly cautious of their legislatively vulnerable position compared to their post-ESRB selves. This 6-year policy, from 1988 until 1994, affected Nintendo of America’s reputation so severely that people who were born after these rules were reversed would mistakenly think them still in effect over 30 YEARS after they were repealed despite not only decades of Nintendo approving content that couldn’t exist on their platforms under that old rule set but also releasing their own ESRB M-rated games ever since as well. Before those rules were even started, the NES had already built a horror library, and even during those 6 years, those rules did not stop new horror games from coming to their platforms. Limitation just had to breed creativity.
Friday the 13th - Feb 1989 - NES
Now this is a game that has a great original score people praise as adding to the fear they had of it. In this horror game you play as a group of 6 camp counselors responsible for children when Jason begins striking. He won’t just get the kids but also you and your friends split up around the camp, which is the purpose of small cabins to store and swap which counselor you’re playing as. There’s nowhere safe from Jason to put the counselors or kids, so you’ll have to fight him off for 3 days with beautiful and eerie scenery across different times of day. When it comes to difficulty…compare it to the previous game and the original movie trilogy, where the killer is just some girl or guy, a zombie powerhouse. Jason of the later movies is a durable force in this game that has commanded both respect and frustration from players, leading to many instances of what may be my favorite fail screen in horror game history: “You and your friends are dead. Game Over.” Due to the rental laws of the United States, publishers don’t have a say on if their games can be made available for rent or not, resulting in a trend of making the US version of video games much harder to win at in order to stop most people from being able to beat a game on rental. The normal difficulty of video games in the US is sometimes even offered in other countries as a bonus extra-hard challenge mode. I say this was a trend, but it would last from the third, fourth, fifth, and at least to the end of the sixth generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s even seventh-gen examples, and a tester for Friday the 13th has implied publisher LJN imposing this on Friday the 13th is responsible for this double-edged sword of the game being a harsh challenge some respect and others find too frustrating to work at.
You all start off with no weapons, only being able to throw rocks, and apart from wolves, bats, and killer crows, Jason isn’t the only zombie around… as all his victims seem to be rising from the dead too! There’s a full zombie apocalypse happening that the manual recommends using to farm for weapons and items, giving the game a grunt enemy to keep satisfaction up with combat. They can also drop a lighter that can be used to light fireplaces for PRETTY GOOD drops, like a flashlight to reveal a particular passage in the platforming-heavy cave system, or one of the rare weapons to really breeze through the combat. Since the opening recommends you try to light them all, it creates the rookie mistake of actually attempting this. Personally, I find it harder than beating the game, so I’d just recommend lighting a few on your way to get some drops and not stressing the challenge of trying to light them all. There’s locked doors, files to read, and many approaches to take. You can row across the lake, you can find Jason’s shack that is locked (implying Jason carries house keys). Inside is Pamela’s severed head as it was in the second movie, and in what is perhaps my favorite liberty taken by a Friday the 13th game, it flies at you and attacks you! It also has various drops, from her iconic machete from the first movie to her sweater, which is thick and dampens damage from enemies. Of course, supposedly putting it on is said to cause Jason to mistake you for Pamela (perhaps at a distance?), but he seems to catch on if he gets close enough and attacks anyway. There you can get a good look at Atlus’s Jason design sporting purple and blue.
By the 90s, calibration screens weren’t an uncommon way to find the right look for everyone’s varying displays, while the 80s NES game way tended to be to make things pop enough to be a one-size-fits-all image. Some customers were on the darkened picture of weathered family CRTs with NES launch cables, for the red eye of the crow was vital to its black sprite not sneaking up on those players. Still, some people wonder why not use that color palette for Jason, with the white of his mask serving the role of the red on the crow, in order to go for more photorealistic colors. Perhaps to see pleasant detail or just easily see what you’re doing, the game has the rather colorful cartoon look common of 8-bit games, so Jason’s colorful sprites actually look natural in darkness to me, which is what I assume they were designed around. The kids have unique palettes for light and dark, but you and Jason don’t, with palettes that have to universally pop in every environment at every time of day.
There’s a common theory that the choice of purple and blue in particular came from the 3D drawing on the back of the theater program for Friday the 13th Part 3D, but I’ve always thought this sounded a little far-fetched for how much traction it has. It becomes even harder to believe when it morphs into the devs not knowing what Jason looked like outside of this booklet when it includes a splash of color stills, including the actual shot of Jason coming through the window from the movie or the cover of the shot of the mask with a knife through the eye from the fourth movie being recreated in the game. The previous Domark game went with the same blue mask color when recreating this same shot in the CPC version, and I believe both of these games' developments would have been a bit early for it to be likely they took inspiration from the skyline poster for Jason Takes Manhattan, which is another theory. That poster was a last-minute replacement for the movie’s July 1989 release in the US, while the NES game was released in February, according to Nintendo Power. Maybe the seventh movie’s poster using a Part 5 mask in this same color is responsible for the game’s sprite lacking a brow chevron… or maybe they just didn’t want it to turn into a unibrow when viewed through a CRT. As for the color theories, I lean more toward these being coincidence because I’m not sure you need inspiration to think of representing darkness with blue in a cartoon or even saturating black to purple, especially in a spooky context, but the true answer may be forever lost to the memories of Hideyuki Yokoyama… before he disappeared to the fishing realm…
Outside, however, can trip people up when navigating due to the roads on the map being circular despite the view of navigating them in gameplay being side-scrolling. At the bottom of a circular road on the map, moving right on screen takes you right on the map, but say you keep going clockwise and you’ll eventually loop up to the top of a circle on the map, resulting in moving right causing you to move left on the map since the camera is always on the outside of a circle looking in, keeping the center of each circle in the background when side-scrolling. The actual goal of this game is simple despite being challenging. Fight off Jason for 3 days with at least 1 playable character and 1 child surviving by the end, but you have so many ways to strategize and plan to do this. Different people prefer to take on Jason in the side-scrolling nature versus the behind-the-back interiors.
Friday the 13th: Road to Hell - 2006 - J2ME
The 1980s was a time of so many strong horror games, including Namco’s slasher movie-inspired beat-em-up series Splatterhouse, that out-Jason’d the official games for many! In 2006, Friday the 13th would officially try this gameplay style with the J2ME game Road to Hell, where Jason is traveling down to the depths in search of a boiling cauldron to enjoy the agony of sinners down there. I can dig the more Splatterhouse-esque visuals, but it just falls short in the gameplay department for me. Its pacing is a bit too slow. Releasing in 2006, I can see it trying to capture that menacing Ken Kirzinger Jason movement, but I just don’t think being faithful to that works for a side-scrolling beat-em-up with these visuals, and Kirzinger Jason did run in one scene. If it weren’t for the variety of weapons, I’d call this the slasher equivalent of Godzilla: The Series: Monster Wars, but I still think that’s the closest comparison I’d make to this game, and I think the thorn in this game’s side might be the platform choice. Are you going to develop a full-on Splatterhouse game for $3, and how can you compete in the 2006 phone market for more than $3? Well, Road to Hell would rebrand to Thursday the 12th upon its license expiring, and another would throw their hat at making a Friday the 13th game.
Friday the 13th - 2006 - J2ME
Xenedex’s game is an adaptation of the first movie, including the degree of violence from the first movie. The minimalism of the sound and music can come off as retro in a bad way though… But this is surprisingly a good genre fit for what the first Friday the 13th is: a gruesome murder mystery!
Now around this time, the seventh generation, is when that multiplayer style of a group of players on one team versus one super-powerful player was becoming a common occurrence in horror games, and this continued through the eighth generation with one game in development being Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp. I assume the idea being that each volume could parody a different slasher film, with the first being Friday the 13th. RetroRealms Arcade would eventually be a Splatterhouse version of this concept but offer officially licensed expansion packs instead of selling them separately as sequels. Slasher Vol. 1 would attract the attention of the Friday the 13th license holder and become officially licensed itself, but they would go for that group of players vs. one powerful player style of multiplayer as their main meat.
Friday the 13th: The Game - 2017, May 26 - PS4, Xbox One, Windows 7
As the game updated, they’d technically have Jason’s from Parts 1-10 but only Parts 2-9 Jasons. Roy is the Jason for Part 5, while Jarvis is playable as a survivor, which also features characters from the movies. They’d eventually use all this to create a single-player campaign that let you swap between playing as the Jasons of your choice between chapters. There’s even a Part 5 chapter, but I do wish they’d had some kid dub over Pamela’s lines when playing as Roy. You normally hear her voice in your head, and people often point out how odd it is when you’re playing as Roy. They’d also add a skin for LJN Jason, though I don’t know why they made it a skin for part 3 Jason. Neca does the same thing when making merchandise, and I can only speculate it was either because of the 3D advertisement theory or the press kits for the LJN game seeming to use Part 3 Jason instead of Part 7, zombie Jason, being on the cover, and I imagine what most people presumed this to be in the game. Am I crazy? That game is literally all zombies. Even Pamela’s head comes undead! The difference in the PS4 game being that pre-lightning bolt Jasons can run, while post-lightning bolt Jasons can’t, though both can turn into the Evil Dead flying camera effect to move faster than any other player in the game. I don’t think I ever liked this solution to humans being able to outrun the Jasons that can’t run. It is an interesting conundrum of gameplay, though.
I never understood why people call the body language Kane Hodder gives Jason subtle, but it’s definitely distinct. Since he mocaps Jason in this game, it makes the 3 Jasons he played in the movies feel more like themselves but can have the reverse effect for the 5 Jasons he didn’t play in the movies that are playable in this game. I always saw the body language he gave Jason as exaggerated in a way that matches the less serious tones of the movies he played Jason in, which is not a direction for the series I’m as into when looking back. Some people really like slashers to be campy with cartoon logic, but it’s never been for me. Outside of that, the game overall always came off as clunky-feeling to me. Moving around and doing things always felt as rough as the character models looked. If it weren’t for the license, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed anything about this game… outside of recreating the Jason X liquid-nitrogen kill with a toilet. That’s a good one! Matchmaking troubles I’m forgiving of. The game just felt so bare-bones in content and execution. You know, watching that same rough-looking one too many times since it starts every match, making it get old fast. Its initial release felt more like a rough beta that took a year to feel like the amount of content I’d expect of a 1.0, but, to be fair, I’m the only person I know who felt this way. Everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives during this game’s heyday.
Parts 1 and 10 Jasons would be added as NPCs in the game’s updating first-person single-player DLC, Virtual Cabin, that I’d compare to Resident Evil 7’s updating Beginning Hour demo. Of course, getting to see Part 10 Jason and briefly explore the spaceship in this was to tease Part 10 Jason and the ship being added in multiplayer, but to many’s surprise, there was that copyright act that allows a movie’s writer to demand a transfer of the rights to them after 35 years. With the 2010s being 35 years after 1980, the original movie’s writer did this, with the court ruling in his favor meaning he now owned the rights to what he wrote for that movie, seemingly including Camp Crystal Lake and Pamela. Future content for the PS4 game would be canceled, but it would still get a Nintendo Switch port. There was Friday the 13th Puzzle Killer that got to Jason X before this must’ve shut them down, and something about the way they worded not being able to renew the license gives me the impression that because rights to the content in the games were now split, they couldn’t get a new licensing agreement for them. Reminds me of when the movies stopped being called Friday the 13th and just started being called “Jason.” It makes me curious how often Jason’s appearances in video games afterward, like in Multiversus or Fortnite, include Part 1 content. As for the PS4 game, people do still seem to buy it physically, but it appears that the game saved and unlocked things via an always-online account syncing, meaning the absence of a server even breaks the single-player modes!
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Now this is an IP; I always thought it must be a real nightmare to design a game around. The movies are about a child abductor who was burned alive by the parents of the town before he came back as a spirit to get the rest of the children, now teenagers, through their nightmares! He does them in with such unique and grand, non-repeating visuals, so how do you tackle this in a video game? Well, the idea for an NES game is that the player is Freddy and can travel through the electrical and plumbing lines as well as mirrors to get around Elm Street, slaying the teenagers trying to get rid of you by finding your scattered remains and burying them, finally putting your soul to rest. It’s also mentioned that some of those teenagers will have powerful dream alter egos that can awaken, implying they can become lucid-dreaming warriors to fight against you. Not much about this version of the game exists, as by the Halloween season of 1989, Nintendo Power would report the script has been flipped!
A Nightmare on Elm Street - 1990 - NES
You now play the teenagers in 4-player, simultaneous, co-op! You’re still looking for Freddy’s bones, but you must also now find a key to Elm Street High School so you can burn them in a furnace. The world map was finalized to be side-scrolling with enemies to encounter. I will say Elm Street isn’t the prettiest to look at when so much of it consists of brick wall with just the night sky as background, but I do like that it doesn’t loop in this game, allowing you to hit a dead end and have to backtrack through danger. You have to decide if you’re going to go left or right when exiting a place with more consequence to choosing the wrong direction. It is also quite the diverse game world, from the cemetery to Freddy’s old boarded-up house. Each area is an abstract interpretation of the location, though there is an awake and dream world version of everywhere that are minimally different. They don’t change from the mundane to the fantastical; the world always looks like a nightmare and becomes a Silent Hill Otherworld version of itself when you fall asleep. Sometimes you will just fall asleep at set points to fight bosses too. Coffee can help you fight off your sleepiness, with the manual promoting you keep each other awake when in multiplayer since it drags all of you into the dreamworld. Having to keep each other awake on this sleep-deprived adventure is such a cool idea and so Nightmare on Elm Street! The game really does feel made for that group exploration. I find it simpler but harder than NES Friday the 13th when alone, so I might recommend only playing this with at least one other player. It definitely hits different when hitting the end of a level and realizing you missed one bone and have to backtrack alone. The trade-off to falling asleep is you can lucid dream in the form of 3 dream warrior classes, which you can each obtain and swap between. These classes only seem to be found in the waking world to then be used in the dream world, but if you’re in the dream world too long… Freddy will find and attack you. You’ll know he’s near as his lullaby begins playing, adding an element of pursuer horror. Hitting a boombox can snap you awake with the music ramp-up, feeling so invigorating that it really captures the vibe of the third movie for me. As for the actual enemies and Freddy imagery in this game, it’s so-so. There’s some pretty good designs, but the game lacks variety of enemy design overall. Still, it captures the vibe of exploring A Nightmare on Elm Street together.
A Nightmare on Elm Street - 1989 - DOS 2.11, C64
A more single-player-focused game that's an adaptation of the famous third movie. The DOS version gets minor additions, mostly visuals that make it my preference over the C64 version. The game can have quite the strong first impression with Freddy slashing his way through the bureaucracy of the opening logos to introduce himself. In the DOS version, he’ll already start cheating you in the character select screen! In both versions Joey serves as the damsel in distress as he did in the movie, making him unselectable, and there is an animation representing this on DOS, but as you decide who you want to pick, Freddy will randomly take people on the character select screen, laughing, “One less choice to make!” and he can start by taking your favorite, so pick before Freddy gets you in the menu! Once you select someone, you’re dropped into a surprisingly detailed top-down Springwood with diners, gas stations, parks, and parked cars…but this is a nightmare, and giant Freddy is chasing you through the streets! You’re on the lookout for Freddy’s old decrepit house to try to get in his head. This isn’t some set sequence, either. His house will be at a different address each playthrough. Once inside, you have but a moment to prepare yourself, as this real-time game has limited ammo, inventory, and you start with no weapon but can pick up a knife and/or bat here. Instead of picking up classes, each character is their set class from the movie, creating a wide variety of durability and abilities that may range in usefulness to you. For example, Will is a glass cannon wizard who can shoot lightning from his hands, while Nancy, perhaps driven to save him, can take more punishment before falling, but her dream warrior power is to stall the game clock. This is because opening a secret passage in Freddy’s house allows you to explore deeper and deeper into impossible space where the other dream warriors are about but vulnerable. How long will they last without you? You can try to find them to build up a party to take on Freddy as the dream warriors, but as the back of the box advertises, he will cheat! I can’t remember ever playing a survival horror game that screwed with me this much. This isn’t Eternal Darkness, where sanity effects are primarily visual. You have to live with the consequences of this game messing with you at any moment, which left me constantly on edge. You’ll see a weapon you want behind a locked door, and upon unlocking it, it not only turns into batteries for a gun you don’t have, but unlocking the door also moves you one space over to the spinning whirlpool that rapidly damages you next to it. Teleports, including the way forward, can be disguised as any number of things, including one of these whirlpools, which can make you unsure if you should try to jump into them! You don’t know what to trust! The spirit of Freddy’s mother, Amanda, is trying to help you so she and her son can both be laid to rest, but you can’t tell when the guidance you’re being given is maybe secretly Freddy trying to mislead you.
Much like the movies, he won’t wait for you to come to him either. When you hear steel claws scraping… He’s near and will try to get a quick cheap kill on you while still focusing on self-preservation, leaving and having a drop when damaged too much. To make sure you didn’t just copy the game, you may also run into quizzes asking about the game’s manual. I hope you saved before this was sprung on you because when I’ve tried to answer wrong, it locked my game…though you’d never get a shady copy of this game now, would you? I’ll tell you what’s really dastardly: placed in probably intentionally unavoidable spots throughout the game are magnets that, when touched, pull a random item from your limited 6-slot inventory onto the floor and take its place in your pocket. Hope you noticed and didn’t keep going until seeing the magnet in your inventory. These are often packed in groups to presumably troll you as you accidentally touch another while trying to drop the magnet and pick up what it pulled from your inventory. Coffee works as a healing item, which is weird because you’re not waking yourself up. Similarly, Hypnocil, which is used for dream suppression in the movies, both a heal AND replenishes your dream warrior mana. You’d think it’d be a healing item at the expense of your ability to lucid dream. There’s also holy water that acts as hand grenades on top of just regular old hand grenades. There’s even coins and vending machines to buy all kinds of items you can also explore for, which is the kind of goofy that fits right in with A Nightmare on Elm Street. It seems rare to find a map, and they are here but expensive, and I never personally found an area particularly hard to learn/remember the layout of. There’s also a tunneling mechanic where you can break through certain walls in chunks, which is why Kincaid is a fan favorite of those who don’t want more projectiles than the guns of the game provide, like myself. His super strength allows him to punch through these walls when others would need to have a pickaxe in their limited inventory. He is a power puncher who can gas out quickly to further balance that as well. When it comes to the game world, it mostly does a good job of getting me picturing the way the dream worlds are portrayed in the movies and show. The flaming rooftops in darkness, ectoplasm maze, it all coming to you finding yourself in the red boiler room industrial zone that’s become iconic of Freddy! I even take note of the C64 version of Freddy’s house using grey metal frames an uncross-hatched textures on chairs and… what are sofas in the DOS version but closer resemble metal frame benches in the C64 version. It doesn’t look like home furniture. In fact, when you get to the wheelchair enemies, it makes me wonder if this is a mind trick to look like the mental hospital your playable characters come from. Now that’d be some nightmare trickery, but I say the game mostly does a good job with environments because there’s this stereotypical ice dungeon that I feel is going too unfamiliar and generic when I already feel the ectoplasm maze is pushing it. To me, the familiar places of our lives is integral to the recipe of looking like a nightmare. Stray too far from those familiar places, and you stop capturing the personal aspect that makes dreaming impactful.
Final Thoughts
It’s so fascinating thinking about how to approach making a video game of a nightmare on Elm Street game. The sleep deprivation aspect is probably the most interesting to explore to me. There was an FMV game in 2010 that’s now lost media called Keep Her Awake where you’re scored for how long you can possibly keep yourself awake through anything from cold showers to cutting before finally hopelessly succumbing to Freddy. You see so many different genres for Slashers in games. There was a Child’s Play Temple Run clone, a Scream game in 2011 that was like a casual version of Hotline Miami where you’re Ghostface and I see people like these games as simple dumb fun! There’s still new slasher movies coming out with new slasher movie video games and, with history present, it’ll be interesting seeing how upcoming slasher movie games might take things even further.