Game Theory: The video game where Jason Voorhees can murder Steven Universe is coming back

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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You have to assume, if you’re playing in a video game as cinematic mass-murderer Jason Voorhees (of Friday The 13th fame), and you’ve just slammed your axe into the skull of Cartoon Network child hero Steven Universe, whatever you’re doing has got to be illicit. Maybe you’re screwing around with custom MUGEN arcade characters, or running some very weird mod for the old, abandoned Friday The 13th Game. By no means, you would think, had a lawyer for Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the planet’s largest entertainment companies, watched the hockey mask murderer stuff the “Cookie Cat” kid in a sleeping bag and toss him off a cliff, and said “Yep, we’re happy to endorse this crime!”

But, uh, no: Warner Bros. “Space Jam but it’s Smash Bros., not basketball, but for sure actual human LeBron James is in it” video game MultiVersus is back, bringing with it what is still one of the weirdest cross-promotional video game universes we’ve ever encountered. This is the game where Arya Stark could steal Shaggy from Scooby-Doo’s face before commiserating about rough family situations with Bruce Wayne, or where you could team up the Iron Giant with Stripe from Gremlins, just like in some copyright lawyer’s most haunted and fevered dreams. (Did we mention that when Arya kills people, it generates a pie? And you can eat your own pie? While playing as LeBron James? This is the only game we know of where LeBron James can perform autocannibalism, although, to be fair, we haven’t played every installment of NBA 2K.) The game’s return (and release from “beta” into full release) next week comes with some new tweaks, but the strangeness of seeing Agent Smith from The Matrix murder Taz and Jake The Dog is still its most compelling, let’s call it “feature.”

As to those tweaks: The most obvious addition, in the preview of the game’s full release that we played around with last week, was a new “Rifts” mode that allows players to fight against the computer for once, instead of each other, in a series of extended campaigns. (Complete with new upgrade mechanics, battle passes, and currencies, because, like every free-to-play game in the world today, MultiVersus absolutely loves that shit.) And although some of these new campaigns add in mini-games—target breaking, races through levels, an occasional oddball boss battle, etc.—these additions were mostly slight. The real meat of the update came in the form of a series of fights against computer-controlled opponents, pitting players’ skills at MultiVersus’ more rigorous take on Smash Bros. “Knock your opponents off the side of the screen” combat to the test.

If you haven’t played MultiVersus in a minute—mayhaps because its corporate overlords pulled the thing off every digital storefront, essentially burying the entire project, for a year—these initial bouts might shock you with how hard they can be. Partly that’s because the difficulty has been tuned for grinders (with the unlocking of a few upgrade gems after a fight or two making early fights go more smoothly), but also because there’s always been a deceptively meaty take on Smash Bros.-style combat lurking underneath the IP Vomit that covers most of MultiVersus’ surfaces. The game’s tutorial menus are kind enough to give you detailed information about every move in your characters’ arsenal, which the game then dutifully expects you to apply to all the problems a fight can produce, balancing damage, knockback, armored effects, and more. To the extent that there’s genuine joy here—beyond the perverse pleasure of seeing Superman punch the shit out of Rick Sanchez or Bugs Bunny—it’s in seeing the ways these various, mostly-beloved characters have been mapped onto this mechanical rigor, in seeing the ways that, say, the cheerful Banana Guards from Adventure Time can be made to be genuinely functional fighting game characters.

Mostly, though, it’s about the weirdness: The sheer strangeness of seeing Jason Voorhees stalk some of the most wholesome characters in kid media, and then try to bury an axe in their skulls; of watching Black Adam getting his ass kicked by Velma Dinkley or Gizmo The Mogwai. It’s never entirely clear if MultiVersus knows what a monster it is, a mashed-up bolus of haphazard franchises bound together by nothing but money and the genuine, laudable efforts of the developers at PlayFirst Games to make something actually good while laboring under the eye of Sauron. (We are genuinely shocked the Eye Of Sauron isn’t a character in this, actually, although, hey, give it a year.) There’s a good enough core game here—and it’s been long enough since Nintendo actually put out a Smash Bros. game of its own—that we found ourselves surprisingly happy to be playing it again during our time with the preview. (Suffice it to say that the combat AI is genuinely great, giving satisfying fights at multiple levels of skill.) But that doesn’t change the fact that having some of cinema’s most high-kill-count murderers face off with a bunch of Cartoon Network all-stars isn’t ridiculously fucking weird.