Slender (PC): Finally, Someone remembered how to do horror right.

I had never heard about this game before now. But a friend passed a long a Rooster Teeth (who I friggen love, by the way) video of "Rage Quit", where Micheal and Gavin Co-Play Slender together. It's fairly typical Rage Quit fanfare, but the game looked pretty creepy. But as I was dicking around on another online game, another discussion of it came up talking about how scary it is. After hearing about it in two different places twice in one day and that it was free to play, I decided to take a crack at it.

SLENDER:(PC)

So if you go by the storyline provided to you in the actual game, the story of Slender is "Collect 8 pieces of paper." I had to do a bit of research on but as I understand it, the paraphrased legend of the Slender Man goes like this: the buzz about the legend of the Slender Man started (created?) on the Something Awful forums in the late 90's, but parallels to the legend seem to document well before that.  He stands at about 8-15 feet tall and has extraordinarily large limbs, occasionally with tendrils coming from him. 

Supposedly is able to access a 4th dimension it allows him to seemingly vanish and appear without a trace, although modern camera equipment has been able to capture him, however his abilities distort it. He has an affinity for children, and kidnaps them for reasons only known to him, but has been known to attack adults. He will stalk his target from days to years, gradually picking away at their sanity and sending them into a serious state of paranoia, where he tends to lure people to his favored hunting ground, typically a forest.

He stalks his prey, causing them to panic before triggering a complete breakdown and shatters their mind to a nearly catatonic state. He and his victim vanish with many cases of the victim never being found again, although some cases report the body being found impaled on a tree branch and left to bleed to death. The slender man in these cases will remove each of the organs one at a time, place them in a plastic bag, and then replace them into the body before leaving them. Motivations are never known, but apparently there seems to be no pattern for how the Slender Man chooses his victims aside of what strikes his fancy. (Information on the Slender man Lore found at http://theslenderman.wikia.com)

So yeah, that's horrifying premise this game is based upon. You play what I assume is meant to be yourself, you are in a fenced in area of the forest and you are trying to find 8 manuscript pages left behind by the Slender man. 

The controls are fairly simple, you use your mouse to look around and the mouse buttons to pick up pages or kill your flashlight. Movement is the standard gamer PC WSDA movement set up, with two buttons to zoom and holding left shift to jog. That's it. That's all you get. I struggle to find a comparison to this game from its play alone but I supposed I could say its Myst meets Amber meets Alan Wake? That's probably not accurate but yeah, a horrifying version of Myst seems the most right.

While much of the game takes place in darkness in dim wooden areas,
the fog and atmosphere are rendered beautifully.

The game starts you off at sort of a calm pace but there is already a lot of tension right as you begin. All you can hear as you walk around the forest are the sounds of your footsteps on the underbrush. The occasional chirping of a cricket or the flutter of a nearby bird. You are bound by the restriction of the fence, but the movement rate is pretty slow. It causes this gradual level of tension as you walk around, as if you were actually walking scared in the woods: slow, uneasy, and alarmed. It definitely puts you in the right mindset for this kind of game. 

You are generally safe when you first start the game up, as you have yet to do anything to upset the Slender Man. But if you happen to stumble upon one of the pages of his manuscript and take one, then the chase begins. The game doesn't exactly feature music but rather a series of low resonating drones that you'd hear in horror films. it does a wonderful compliment to build the unease and you immediately know that now he is after you, and with each page you pick up the droning because louder and more intense as the slender man draws near...

You will always know when the Slender Man is closing in on you because the screen gradually get more static and garbled as he draws near. So if static starts to pick up on the screen, you want to turn your ass around as quick as possible. Sometimes you can catch a brief glimpse of him, but more often than not you will be too panicked to try to stare him down. It will also shake the shit out of you each time you stumble across him with a loud pang of noise whenever you get too close. 

Probably one of the creepiest aspects is he sometimes has a very Jason Voorhees method of stalking you. There will be times where I have caught a glimpse of him and turned around and ran a few steps. But when I turned back around he was clearly much closer than when I first ran away from him. So I would turn around again and run a much further distance thinking it was safe to turn back around, only to find that he was even closer this time.  

If he is this close? You are probably already fucked. 

I at one point had the brilliant idea that maybe he was tracking me by the movement of my flashlight, so when the static started to appear I killed the light and turned around and slowly creeped away. I managed to make it a good number of steps, thinking that I was completely home free when he suddenly appeared right in front of me with a loud DUNNNNN causing me to violently shit my pants in fear and was immediately caught. So don't make the same mistake I did, the Slender man does not give a shit and half about your flashlight.

Last thing you see before you die.....

I have yet let last any more than 3 or 4 pages in this game before he gets me. It seems like the pages are in the same places each time but I've yet to get far enough into the game to confirm that with certainty. That's really all there is to explain about that game because that's about as deep as it goes. But if you'll notice, I have been practically gushing about this game as I have and explained each of its parts and I can tell you why that is..

These developers understand the keys to great horror game. Somewhere along the line devs forgot the simple rules that make a game terrifying. First off, nothing makes a game scarier than a feeling of being completely helpless. Old Resident Evil games worked because the ability to move was awful, and you had very limited shots. Silent Hill? Same concept: you are alone, everything seems to be after you, and your basically fighting for your life with a stick. Fatal Frame, throngs of ghosts coming at you with murderous intent and all you have to defend yourself is a camera. All of these games emphasize on the point that if you are trapped you are basically fucked and your only real course of defense is to flee. You are always tense. 

Two, low visibility. Lets face it, even as adults we can be afraid of the dark. By narrowing down the scope of your vision, you are constantly looking over your should and checking around for any imminent danger. You NEVER feel safe. Knowing that the threat is constantly waiting for you and stalking you, and you have a dim flashlight in a foggy forest to find him. The shadows and fog constantly play tricks on you and makes you see things that are not there.

Three, music and sound are terrifying. A brilliantly written horror music score can certainly raise the tension, but nothing is quite scarier than a break in the silence that you didn't cause. From a quiet forest ambiance to a increasingly menacing drone, the sound constantly pushes your level of fear that he is closing in on you, and rocks your readiness with loud pangs every time you accidentally stumble upon your predator. It is executed perfectly.

Lastly, they understood that less you can see of a monster or enemy the scarier it is. So they go to great lengths to try design the game where you are penalized for trying to see him. Sometimes he will completely vanish from right in front of you, but if you keep your gaze on him the screen scrambles as your sanity vanishes, resulting in a game over. It keeps you running from an unknown that you can't see, and it makes it that much more terrifying as a result.

For quite a while I was starting to wonder if people knew how to make good horror games anymore, as I watched all my favorite horror game franchises turn into fast paced action shooters. It was disappointing. However, this game has shown me that some people out there still get "it" and can still come up with some pretty original concepts from ones used before, and use simple tricks of light & sound to turn me into the frightened 5 year old kid I once was.

So crank up your video card settings, turn off the lights, turn up sound, and slip into your favorite brand of disposable undergarments and give Slender a shot. I doesn't cost you a dime to play and you can find it for free at http://slendergame.com/. If this game doesn't get your heart rate pumping, I'd call a mortician because you are probably dead.

Now if you will excuse me... I have to change my pants.