Friday the 13th's server issues are being fixed, developer says

Tyler has enjoyed his time with Friday the 13th so far (expect his full review this week), but the multiplayer Jason vs Teens game has not launched in the best state, with plenty of Steam reviews complaining about connection issues and bugs. If this is you, perhaps you'll be mollified by this forum post from developer Illfonic, which explains the problem with the servers (basically, far more players concurrently playing the game than were expected), while going into a bit of detail about the fixes planned.

The team have recently upgraded the servers, meaning that some of the people that were previously unable to connect to the game at all should now, hopefully, be able to. An update to that forum post yesterday explained that "users might start seeing their accounts come back, though they will see Lvl. 0 displayed with everything unlocked. This seems be getting stable. We are *pretty* sure that all of your save data is on the backend, still being tracked, but not displaying on your client. This is progress, but in no way final progress. Should have more info".

Since then, Illfonic has been releasing regular status updates on the game's Facebook page, with the latest going into even more detail about the causes of its problems, while promising that the team are "working around the clock to get this solved".

"We are a small team but brought in outside resources to help. It's our top priority right now and we need to make sure we can get our servers properly scaled and balanced to handle the current demand. Once we can alleviate some stress on the database this should all start working smoothly. We are working hard to properly load balance our servers and identify issues with accounts that are slowing down the database".

To that end, the servers will be shut down for a few hours from 7am EST (12pm GMT) to around 10am EST (3pm GMT)—this action will hopefully fix the database problem. (Thanks, commenter Code 117.)

if you're able to connect to the game, here's how you can kill Jason. Though of course, he won't stay dead for long.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.