Slender: The Arrival

I was 13 when this came out. I LOVED the freeware Slender: The Eight Pages and bought this on launch. Even though it only had like 5 super short levels at the time (pretty criminal honestly for the price they were charging) I still really liked it... cause I was, you know, 13, and stupid.

Nostalgic as I am for this, it is not a good game. It's made in the Unity engine and suffers from the same problem most Unity engine games have that go for a photo-realistic look; surfaces are low-poly and shiny, lighting is pretty flat when it's not pitch black, and there's very little interactivity in the environments other than certain objects meant as objective goalposts.

The devs went back over the years and added in some much longer (and scarier) additional levels to the game, but it still is a pretty short game for the price. The *biggest* problem by far with the game though is how every level recycles the exact same objective: collect X number of objects while avoiding Y pursuer. Sometimes the objects are pages, or generators, and the pursuers are--besides Slender Man--an emaciated boy and a deformed, possessed teenage girl.

But it really makes no difference; every level is basically the same concept reskinned, and like the original freeware game there is not any intelligence in how you complete your objective. There's no stealth mechanics used to avoid the creatures; there's no way of knowing what route they will take or how many times they can jump on you before ending the game. So basically the game amounts to stumbling through a dark maze hoping you get lucky and avoid your pursuer.

There's also no real story to speak of; the cliche diary entries and notes picked up throughout are too vague, and the final "revelation" at the end is a audio diary that's so garbled its impossible to tell what the characters are saying without subtitles enabled.

All that said, this game's one saving grace is that it IS kind of scary. Though I just complained about the lack of story, the ambiguity does contribute to a palpable sense of dread throughout, and the sight of Slender standing on a distant mountain in some of the early stages can give a good chill. Some of the new stages added by the devs years after initial release were particular highlights. One involves playing as a toddler whose lured to his demise by Slender; this segment is short but genuinely terrifying. Another new stage is a flashback to some investigation on a ranch, and there is a tense chase scene that starts in a dank cellar and continues though a wheat field and then a church. These two stages, added a few years after initial launch mind you, are definitely highlights of the game.

Despite some scary moments, this is definitely not worth even the $10 its currently being sold for. It's a very incomplete, unsatisfying game whose nostalgia factor still can't save it.

Surprisingly short and surprisingly bland, but that is my fault for thinking, for whatever reason (since my teenager years), that this was the Slender game, but it just ends up being like The Eight Pages with somewhat better graffics and a story (although half-baked and rushed).

One thing they nailed though is the atmosphere, specially the night woods. I was on edge a lot of the time and it really made it worth it.