Friday the 13th is getting a new, free game mode called Paranoia

Asymmetric multiplayer murder sim Friday the 13th is getting a mysterious new game mode called Paranoia, available free to everyone that owns the game. There's no release date (it's coming "soon"), or details of what it will entail. However, fans are speculating that the mode will disguise the killer as a camp counselor, meaning players won't know who the murderer is until they're getting stabbed in the neck.

The theory fits with the trailer for the mode (at the top of this article) and with the #whoisfiVe marketing campaign on the game's social media accounts. It could, fans say, refer to the fifth Friday the 13th film, A New Beginning, in which (spolier alert) the killer turns out not to be masked murderer Jason Voorhees but a copycat called Roy Burns.

It's not hard to imagine this working, with players constantly looking their shoulder as the killer tries his or her best to act natural. Perhaps survivors won't be able to communicate with each other when the killer is near, meaning they can't dob them in when they realise that they're about to get slashed. Paranoia is indeed what comes to mind.

Friday the 13th is currently 50% off as part of Steam's Halloween sale. It will cost you $19.99/£14.99.

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.