Slender: The Arrival

Editor's Notes

PS4 version reviewed.

Introduction

The first true urban legend of the internet age, the Slender Man is a far cry from the hook-handed slayers of young lovers and Bloody Marys of generations past. There is no one Slender Man story, but hundreds, shared and saved forever as "copypasta" on the internet. Blue Island Studios' task is to bring the horror home, make it real, part of a dark, moody, atmospheric first-person survival horror title, making their own indelible mark on the legend.

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

The one thing to respect about 'Slender: The Arrival' is its swagger. It's not a game that stops itself to bring the player up to speed on what exactly this distorted gentleman in this black suit actually is, or what it actually has the ability to do. It simply exists, a fact of the world to be taken for granted, whose mysteries are still a nebulous thing. So when Lauren, the protagonist whose shoes and omnipresent flashlight we inhabit over 'Slender: The Arrival's approximate two hours, hears the scream of her friend Kate echoing over the valley, it has the same effect of hearing Josh's agonized screams after he goes missing in 'The Blair Witch Project': We imagine EVERYTHING could be happening to him. 'Slender' is set up in a way that trusts the player's imagination with itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem is that the game fails to pick up the needed slack and drive the player on with more than what it currently offers.

'Slender: The Arrival' is ultimately little more than a glorified collect-a-thon, where your job is little more than traversing labyrinthine environments in the dark, save for the light of a single, pathetic flashlight, and fulfilling the criteria set, be it collecting eight pages of a diary, turning on six generators in a mineshaft, or closing a certain number of doors and windows. Of course, the issue is that you're being hindered by the Slender Man himself; his presence signaled by the glitching and distortion of the HUD, a piercing high pitched radio signal, and the fact that he can teleport just about anywhere in the game's sizeable environments. Looking at him long enough, or getting too close mean game over. And there lies the biggest problem with the concept, which is that it's hard enough trying to muster up terror for a creature who can't really see.

So, ultimately, you find yourself moving around trying to fix the tracking on your TV, not dodge a terrifying eldritch horror. If you fail, all that happens is a black screen, a shady look at 'Slender' himself, and then you restart. There's a second antagonist that reveals itself down the road, a ghastly imp that pounces on Lauren, tussles her up some, and just vanishes. This too suffers the same problem which, while the creature is creepy, after getting pounced four times in a row and not dying, it's ceases to have any import. It's a shame since the game builds up a heavy, oppressive atmosphere, where darkness is nearly impenetrable, and it's very, very easy to get lost. There's a story to be pieced together as well, suggesting mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, a missing child who may know what's going on, and of course, the eternal specter of the Slender Man himself. This stuff is where the collection is a joy, each new piece offering some new confounding information, and it's not nearly as integral to progression as it should be.