Friday the 13th adding offline mode with bots and raising the level cap

Friday the 13th's asymmetrical multiplayer horror was made to play with friends, or at least with strangers that have mics and are willing to work together. But developer IllFonic is betting that players will want to muck around solo sometimes, and are adding a new offline game mode with bots tomorrow.

You'll only be able to control masked killer Jason Voorhees in the mode, and you can choose to go up against between one and seven camp counselors. You select exactly which counselors you want to face and the map you're stalking them on, as well as the difficulty level: easy, medium, or hard.

As the devs point out, it's a good chance for new players to learn the maps and practice Jason's hunting abilities. The AI will try its best to act like real humans, fixing boats, barricading doors and hiding under beds.

The addition forms part of Illfonic's single player plans for the game. Still to come is a challenge mode that will plop players into various scenarios as Jason and ask them to murder everyone in sight. Like Hitman, but with more gore and the odd shower scene.

The mode is out tomorrow as part of an update that also raises the player level cap from 101 to 150. To give max level players a reason to come back, Illfonic has added some items you can unlock between those two lofty numbers, including new kills and skins for Jason and changes of clothes for the counselors.

The game will kick off a holiday event tomorrow too, but it's not all that festive: it will just increase your chances of finding rare gear and boost the rate at which you earn CP. For more on that, and the full notes for the update, click here. Tyler's review is this way.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.