A tribute to Friday The 13th: Killer Puzzle, an awesome Jason game you CAN’T download anymore!
If you didn’t download Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle on you phone, tablet or game console before 2023, I’ve got some bad news for you: you’ll NEVER be able to play it.
It’s a long story. The game was produced by a developer called Blue Wizard Digital and originally published in 2018. Alas, five years later Killer Puzzle was pulled from cyber storefronts — basically, the developer lost the copyright to the Friday the 13th brand, for reasons that are still a little opaque all these years later. It’s sort of the same fate that befell the Friday the 13th game made by Illfonic — as we all know by now, sorting out the legality of the F13 brand is kinda like trying to make an Etch-A-Sketch drawing and operating a Pogo Stick at the same time.
Whatever the reason, Killer Puzzle is one of those applications that’s forever lost to the ravages of time — theoretically. The good news is that even though the game is “delisted” (meaning there’s no way to download it anymore), it’s still playable IF you already installed it on whatever device you used prior to the 2023 license revocation date. And what do you know, I’ve had Killer Puzzle safely locked down on my iPhone since 2021. It’s way past time I gave it the public praising it deserves.
There are a lot of ironic things about Killer Puzzle. For starters, it’s a shockingly cerebral game that requires a great deal of thinking and strategizing. Not exactly the first thing that comes to mind with a franchise infamously written off as “an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash” by paragons of virtue like Roger Ebert. Secondly, the art style doesn’t exactly fit with the preconceived notion of the F13 mythos. Ultimately, the characters in Killer Puzzle look more like outcasts from a South Park knockoff than a Jason Voorhees tie-in, which isn’t exactly a negative (and indeed becomes quite the positive the longer you play the game.) It’s a very tongue in cheek experience (among other things, you do get words of advice from Pamela Voorhees’ severed head on how to solve certain puzzles), but it’s also an immensely reverential game that knows the Friday lore inside and out. It’s goofy, it’s gory, it’s silly and it’s extremely violent at the same time. So yeah, it’s pretty much the perfect representation of the franchise in video game form.
Pretty much everything about this game is deceptive. When it begins it feels like a simplistic one-plane puzzle game with about as much depth as a hollowed out thimble. Of all things, the game almost reflects the rules of Chess, where you can only move in straight lines — so no zig-zagging or hooking corner turns. To “win” a level, you have to bump into all of the stereotypical victims dotting the stage; every now and then you’ll get a cut-scene which depicts Jason slaying the cannon fodder in extremely over-the-top ways, which still comes off as pretty funny considering how cutesy the character design is.
The first few levels are pretty easy, but it isn’t long before the game starts throwing some curveballs at you. Eventually, you’ll have to work your way around obstacles (i.e., electric fences, open fire pits and even heavily armed SWAT members straight out of Jason Goes To Hell) and even sneak up behind would-be victims and give them a good fright so they’ll move to a different part of the screen and allow you to bump off that oh-so hard to reach final victim. You wouldn’t expect it in a million years, but Killer Puzzle is indeed quite the brain teaser — to the point I’d argue it’s vastly more intelligent than anything we got out of the proper F13 movies, times 100.
There are well over 100 levels in the game, so it’ll take you a LONG time to see everything the game has to offer. There are about a dozen different alternate costumes to unlock and dozens more weapons to collect, so even after you “beat” the game proper you’ll still have a ton of reasons to replay it. And you have to give the guys who made this game all the credit in the world; not only do they adequately pay tribute to the established Friday lore, they even beat Paramount to the punch and give us about seven or eight unrealized sequels that would probably be too cost-prohibitive/awesome to film — including a scenario where Jason gets sent to a super-max prison (bad idea!), left to his own devices in a Road Warrior-esque post-apocalyptic wasteland and even time-displaced to the heyday of Jack the Ripper and even the age of the dinosaurs. It’s fan service to the nth degree and you can tell the developers had an absolute blast taking the material to the most awesomely absurd proportions imaginable. Like, seriously, how have we not gotten some sort of Jason media by now where he goes on a rampage at Disney World (or, barring that, one of the lesser Six Flags or something?)
There’s an argument to be made that Killer Puzzle is possibly the BEST Friday the 13th game ever. And that’s no small compliment considering how many memorable F13 games we’ve gotten over the years. It’s downright tragic that the game can’t be downloaded anymore, but even if you can’t play it natively on one of your devices you can at least go on to YouTube and watch people play it, secondhand. Which is obviously better than nothing here.
Who knows if we’ll ever get a second chance at Killer Puzzle. I’m sure there’s some sort of shady, underhanded technical means of downloading the game anyway, and if we’re not there yet we probably will be in a couple of years. As is, though, consider yourself fortunate if you still have a playable version of this game at your disposal; not only is it one of the best Jason video games ever, it’s one of the best pieces of auxiliary Friday the 13th media we’ll probably ever get.
