Slayaway Camp is a B-movie ’80s horror movie themed puzzle game. You play as a serial killer, and your goal in each puzzle is to kill all of the civilians and then escape the level.
There aren’t many puzzle games that make really effective use of theme and setting in their mechanics. Slayaway camp is a major exception to this rule; the game mechanics rely entirely on the theme and setting, and as such, work really well and in an intuitive fashion.
The mechanics are very simple. Everyone – both you and the civilians – always move in straight lines on a square grid until they run into an obstacle of some sort. When you run into a living creature, you kill them. Your goal is to kill every civilian on the map, then escape through a pentagram, requiring you to maneuver your way around using the mechanics, and avoid getting stuck in a way that you can’t get to the rest of the civilians or can’t reach the exit. The ability to rewind a turn at any time (complete with VHS tape rewind special effects) is a welcome addition, meaning that even if you screw up, you can just go back – indeed, you can rewind back as far as you want, allowing you to undo any number of moves if you think better of what you’ve been doing. After playing this game, I feel like every similar turn-based puzzle game which doesn't have this feature is missing something critical.
But the game makes good use of its horror tropes. If a civilian is standing next to someone who is killed, they will flee in terror in a straight line away from the killed person. If you stand next to a civilian, they will run away in a straight line away from you. You can sneak up behind a cop and kill them, but if you move directly in front of a cop, they’ll kill you. SWAT team officers have longer range, with laser sights on their weapons, and attacking them from any direction will result in your death.
Mastering these leads to encountering further horror movie-themed obstacles. If one of your potential victims runs out of one of the stage exits, you lose as they go off to warn everyone else. If a cat dies (either directly by your hand or due to you scaring it into environmental hazards), it is game over – after all, the ASPCA has to certify no animals were harmed in the making of the movie! If you turn the power off, the civilians can’t see you and won’t react to you being near them or killing people around them, and you can sneak up behind the SWAT team officers and kill them. Electric fences can pose a danger to your movements when the power is on, but can also kill a hapless civilian who is scared into them. Holes in the ground, deep water, or fires can send you hurtling to your doom or burning to death, but you can scare civilians into them to kill them without laying a finger on them – but you have to make sure that those cats don’t get scared into those same hazards.
All of these things combine naturally in a lot of interesting ways, and as you go through the game you learn how to deal with all of the challenges and turn them to your advantage like the depraved serial killer you are.
There are over a hundred levels in the game, broken up into nine “movies”, with each new movie adding in a new mechanic appropriate to the theme, be it bubble gum on the ground in New York that stop you (or your victims) without requiring you to collide with a wall, or teleportation pads on a space station that move you between them while maintaining your direction of travel. Things keep evolving and keeping interesting, and by the time the game is done, it has introduced quite a number of mechanics and used them in a variety of interesting ways. If it had gone on much longer than it did, it would have likely become tiresome, but with the mechanics it had, it ultimately felt like it was just about the right length.
This isn’t a mind-blowingly amazing game – this is not something like Portal or the Talos Principle. There’s no great narrative (though the cheesy faux-’80s movie trailers at the start of each “movie” are amusing), and the game, despite being silly, is never really laugh out loud funny. But it is a game which is a very decent sliding blocks puzzle type game with an interesting horror-movie themed mechanical twist that made it much more memorable and distinctive than the countless puzzle games littering Steam. This isn’t something you should play unless you like puzzle games, but if you are into puzzle games, this might be up your alley – at least, assuming that cheesy “slasher scenes” of extreme violence happening to blocky low-rez characters doesn’t bother you.
4.0