Slender: The Eight Pages

With the survival horror genre turned into a zombie-grinding fest or a forced attempt to replicate the golden years of the horror genre by the late 2000s, it seems like real suspense games are extinct at that point.

Cue Slender, released at the wake of the Amnesia craze.

The premise of the game is simple: an unnamed player character, attempting to uncover the truth behind the Slenderman myth, which itself is inspired by an urban legend circulating in forms of creepypasta around the internet, goes into a forest at night to collect eight pages that are supposedly connected to the elusive faceless, three-piece-suited figure.

Unlike early survival horrors, where the players have at least some form of self-defense with a knife or a gun, the main gameplay mechanic of Slender is the helplessness factor, where the player character is absolutely defenseless and has no other way of reacting than to cower in fear and find a safe place. Now, the main problem with the mechanic is the suspense factor itself. You go around a dark place, armed with only a flashlight with limited battery and you have some faceless apparition stalking you in order to prevent you from collecting all the pages. If he catches you, a loud static plays out of nowhere and your paper-scrounging adventure is over. You see where all of this points at? That's right. Jumpscares.

Slender utilized the tried-and-true, lowest common denominator suspense factor of shocking their audience with audiovisual abuse instead of atmospheric or narrative suspense. Now, shocking scenes aren't bad in itself, but the main selling point of this game is just giving heart attacks and collecting paper in the dark. That's not horror - that's cheap thrill.

I'm glad the second horror craze died out, otherwise we'll be drowning in a sea of C-grade horror games made for the sole purpose of catering to screaming YouTubers.

It is true to a certain extent that this and Amnesia kinda ruined survival horror for all of the 2010s (Outlast made it official), but that doesn't change the fact that this game, simple and stupid as it is, was utterly gripping and terrifying at the time. The game isn't quite as scary nowadays; I don't know if it's because im older or just because the game has been so relentlessly imitated, but it definitely isn't as scary as it used to be. In any case though, this is a free game that was original in its day and earns its place in horror history.