“Slayaway Camp” is an unusual little game. It is definitely a horror game, but it makes no attempt to scare the player. Instead, it offers a tongue-in-cheek puzzle game that serves as an homage to classic slasher flicks. This particular choice interested me, but also made me pretty hesitant. After all, I’m not really much of a horror-comedy fan, especially not when the comedy aspect is that sort of self-aware thing that “Slayaway Camp” seemed to be offering. Ultimately though, the allure of a slasher flick puzzle game won me over, and I decided to give it a look.
There’s really not much “plot” to “Slayaway Camp.” The player controls a variety of psychos as they go around killing teenagers. However, there’s a neat little framing device. The game is broken up into separate “movies.” You pick which movie you want off the shelf of a grimy old video rental place, and then play out the scenes (or puzzles) that make up that movie. There’s never really much story to them, but they all have a big climactic finish (like feeding a camp counselor into a a wood chipper). Like any good slasher, the story really isn’t important and mostly just serves as a framework for gratuitous violence.
“Slayaway Camp” has a rather charming visual style. All of the objects are made of voxels (for those of you who don’t know what that is, they’re pixels with volume, like “Minecraft”). This really works for the game as it’s definitely modern, but at the same time is a clear homage to an older style, which is pretty much exactly what this game is going for. The actual models have a lot of charm, too. The teenagers getting slashed are very expressive, and the killers range from neat cliches (like a clown), to definite homages to certain films (“The Form” is clearly Michael Meyers of “Halloween Fame”), to some unusual but interesting ones (like a substitute teacher in a school level). There’s a lot of violence and gore in the game, but given the visual style of the game it comes off (intentionally) as kind of silly.
Oh man did I love the music of “Slayaway Camp.” Like everything else, it’s clearly an homage to classic slasher films. Specifically, it’s got a heavy influence from those really 80s synthesizer-based scores. It’s not in an updated way like the score of the film “It Follows,” instead it focuses on just recreating that classic sound. It definitely succeeds at that. The sound effects in the game are appropriately cheesy while still having a good weight behind them. There’s also an announcer doing a bit of narration at the start of every “movie” as if he were narrating a trailer. The sound here is just impeccable.
The basics of how to play “Slayaway” camp are simple, you slide your killer around the level and bump into teenagers to kill them. Slide, not walk, that’s important, because part of the puzzle aspect is that your character will move as far as they can in whatever direction you point them, even if it kills them. And once you get the hang of this, the game starts adding new hazards, such as fire and cats (you fail the puzzle automatically if a cat dies). So it’s a pretty basic set-up, but it’s also able to provide some very challenging puzzles.
You may have gathered by now that I absolutely loved “Slayawy Camp.” It’s a loving homage to a wonderful era of horror films. It’s got some good puzzles to keep you thinking. Most importantly, though, it’s just a lot of fun.
