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While we've been watching Stranger Things in my house - we're Team Barb to the bitter end, obv - I've been indulging my fondness for the 80s in other ways, too - namely with the build of an iOS game that has just, with brilliant timing, appeared on Kongregate, and with a funny little Ludum Dare offering that you can download over on itch.io. Both take the same 80s horror aesthetic and do clever things with it. One is in love with videotape, and the other is in love with audio cassettes. Lots and lots of 80s love.Let's look at the videotape one first. Slayaway Camp is the new game from Nate Schmold, whose last offering sent players into space, naked, and asked them to plant flowers across the firmament. Cosmochoria was wonderfully wild and free-wheeling. Slayaway Camp is the exact opposite. You're a Jason-style spree killer, hacking up teens across a range of familiar schlock horror locations. But really, you're a marble rolling around inside a maze: your bloodlust has a spatial logic all its own.
In Slayaway Camp, you can only move in the four cardinal directions, and once you start going, you'll only stop if you hit a wall. This makes the game a real positioning challenge, as you are dropped into each level and have to read the lumps and bumps of the landscape in order to make it to your victims, and then make it back to the exit - which is, of course, marked by a pentagram.
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