Slendy is always, always watching

S_lender: The Eight Pages_ was the first horror game I played. I remember seeing many videos of the game before I played it and thinking this doesn’t look that scary, so ignorantly I downloaded the free indie game and began to play.

The game sees your character alone in a dark forest searching for eight pieces of paper which appear in random locations around a map. Armed only with your torch you must collect these pages while being stalked by the Slenderman, a tall skinny man wearing a suit with no facial features. It sounds easy, and thats what I thought, but I soon realised that what makes this game hard is that it terrifies me every time I play it. The game is very simple but the atmosphere created by the creepy dissonant piano music, the sounds of the forest and footsteps when you aren’t walking make you very aware that you are being stalked. To add to this every time you collect a page the rhythmic beating you hear in the game gets faster and indeed Slenderman get’s faster too. He even has the ability to teleport! The most scary thing about this game is that the way Slenderman takes you is by you looking at him too long. It’s very hard to walk around alone in this dark forest without wanting to look behind you and when you do and see him you can’t help but jump and lose those precious seconds you need to escape. He doesn’t move when you look at him but the screen becomes full of static. Run a bit forward and then check behind you again and he will have moved much closer to you. The only way to beat the game is to be fearless and never look back, something that took me a while to master and even now he still scares me.

It is with some amount of bravery that I then bought the second, longer Slender game, Slender: The Arrival. The first thing I noticed about this game is that the world really is beautiful. You start out in a forest in gorgeous sunshine, and you can’t help but feel safe. Instantly you are aware of all the controls, mainly clicking and walking and you are free to enjoy the scenery. For some reason your character is holding a camcorder (much like in Outlast but without the night vision) but this can be turned off for true immersion in the world. As you progress further from the safety of your car and further into the forest the game makes you feel uneasy. Is someone watching you? By the time you reach your friends house you suddenly realise, the game has progressed to night seamlessly. Slender at night is still a beautiful game but I couldn’t help but be terrified.

A lot of this game takes place much like the original, there is a find-eight-pages level and a turn-on-six-generators level but the random placements of these items and the different levels in which you must complete these objectives does make this game fun to play and replay. There are a few well planned jump scares but overall it is the atmosphere of this game and the fact that you must constantly keep moving which makes this game terrifying and exciting.

The game is short but the variety of levels and items to collect make it good value for money. In contrast to the scary nature of the game, the Steam achievements offer some humour, such as the achievement for using the playground slide in the first level and acknowledging that when Slenderman is in sight you are unable to pause the game which makes fun of your frantic attempts to pause the game to escape him.

Overall Slender: The Arrival is a good scenic short horror game that should belong in your game collection if you are brave enough.

It started my love of Horror games and I have now played (among others) Outlast, Amnesia and Alien Isolation, but nothing amounts to the terror I feel for Slendy. This game may stop any dreams you have of living on a farm or ever going into a forest but it will provide you with adrenaline like no other game. I know.