User Review : Slender: The Arrival

Gaming's current underweight horror champion

Scary stories around a campfire have been a classic template to tell tales for a long time. Whether it’s from a bunch of youths at a summer camp listening to that too-invested camp instructor or watching a bunch of stilted teenage actors on older cheesy TV shows, scary stories around this particular venue probably hold some fond memories for all of us. Now, in the advance of the internet, these hokey stories have found their own home in the creepy pasta threads. One such creation from such stories is Slender Man: a lanky, faceless person in business attire. Back in 2012, he starred in a freeware game that skyrocketed to popularity thanks in part to Toonami’s free advertising. Since then, developer Blue Isle Studios has helped Slender: The Arrival make its way to PS3/360/PC and now to 8th gen consoles PS4 and One (Wii U version release TBA). And though that kind of initially-obscure idea getting such dedication and becoming one of the most polished pieces of Slender Man fiction to date has a "humble beginnings" sort of origin I can appreciate, I’m still left with mixed impressions from the final product.

It's a shame to that being the case too, especially when the intention of Slender's design leaves quite an impression on me. Hearing about him for the first time brought me back to one particular question I heard during my grade-school years: would you be more terrified to see a bear or a dressed-up clown in the woods? The clown would get the most votes because of the unsettling juxtaposition between the character and his setting. And that same kind of question works here with this well-dressed businessman.

The Arrival starts off with a very effective beginning: an awful din as background noise while some intentionally-vague sentences are thrown on-screen en route to your destination. You play as Lauren, trying to meet her friend Kate whose house is conveniently located in the woods and totally isolated from the rest of society. After trekking through a wooded area, you find her house abandoned and showing some unsettling signs of someone, or something, stalking her. With only a camcorder and newly-acquired flashlight in hand, you’re impelled to go deeper into the woods to investigate.

This opening does a great job in giving the player a respectable amount of possibility space to find notes and interact with the surroundings in a few subtle ways. This kind of heuristic exploration gave me high hopes for the game. Aside from the weird decision of having some notes written in tough-to-read handwriting, it does a good job in giving these characters back stories and compelling arcs in a respectfully subtle way for the player to piece together. It goes a long way of contextualizing play for this concept, which is a shame because after those first twenty minutes we’re back to the same freeware game template that was really sub-par already.

For those who may have missed Slender: The Eight Pages, the structure is rather simple: you’re plopped in the woods with no map and have to maneuver through this landscape to collect eight pages. Slender Man tries to catch you by teleporting off-screen and having your camera experience loud audio shocks and disorienting visual shutters whenever he’s near, becoming more and more louder the closer he gets. That sort of vision of bringing Slender Man to life sounds interesting on paper, especially for such a cool design like him, but the end result just doesn’t click. And I simply can’t disregard this to just being personal taste when I see some inherent flaws with this kind of design for a horror game.

The best way to funnel down my issues would be in just considering it as more of a game than a horror experience that the atmosphere tries so hard to build up. By that I mean I noticed more of the game’s tasks on a mechanical level and the frustration caused by that more than the trepidation felt in these haunting levels. Even with considerations for the subtle changes to the formula are made, both with settings and enemies, it’s still just a lot of trial and error until learning the map and the moves of your enemies. Even after trying to avoid Slender Man in these drawn-out early encounters, the effect of these jump scares just start to drain as you begin to get some inclination of when they’re going to happen. Eventually it just comes down to the point of the only scares just being quick, strident sound shocks that thunder in a moment’s notice.

Because of this loose set of rules tied to such shallow mechanics, the game's systems are learned by rote and quickly make planning overshadow the horror intended to be experienced. Since it’s mostly about Slender Man appearing off-screen, there are subtle tricks in trying to trap him behind geometry or keeping him at bay on another part of the map. Since he doesn’t start stalking until the first page is grabbed, acquiring the page in the middle of the map first is the de facto way of getting a leg up on the chase while using the edges of map and backpedaling to your advantage. Even then, sometimes he’ll just teleport a few feet from your location and that kind of move just feels so cheap. He may be some kind of demon or...something but that kind of move reinforces just how transparent even his most surprising move actually is, which goes against crafting that special kind of horror atmosphere.

There’s a couple of secondary enemies in the game as well: one’s there for some scripted scenes while the other’s a girl who contrasts Slender Man’s rule set quite well. Rather than trying not to stare at her you have to blind her by zooming-in with your flashlight (RT). Credit’s due for that changing up the formula while forcing you to turn on six generators instead of collecting pages, but the issues with this shallow gameplay still permeate in this setup and she’s more annoying when considering that blinding her doesn’t register instantly, allowing her to attack you even when that shouldn’t be the case.

While these considerations do make me disappointed in the core aspect of these Slender game iterations, it’s still impressive to see how much else is added in stretching out this initial concept to feel like a complete experience. Like in the beginning, there are a few breaks between these collect-a-thon levels that offer a lot of possibility space to further explore the surrounding area before having to go back to the meat of the game. There’s even a decent farm level with a linear structure that provides some grim details about Slender Man and had this cellar stage that was arguably the best part of the whole game. So many of these parts add a good amount of value to the overall product and provide some of the most atmospheric moments throughout. But for all the good it does in adding variety to the overall package, it’s tough to go on praising multitudinous side dishes when the main entrée loses flavor so quickly.

When considering just how much of that meat had me thinking of the logistical side of strategies and maneuvers that comes back to that core issue of just feeling like a collect-a-thon game relying on cheap jump scares; that’s something that doesn’t blend well for something of a horror game. In a genre that’s at its most powerful when it’s evoking mystery and unsettling emotions in the back of your head due to the unknown, Slender’s goal is readily transparent and even further explained via collectibles. Beyond that, the systems of interaction don’t have the potential of new procedural game states and are pretty limited in testing player dexterity. So you’re left with both a titular character and the simplistic systems that are readily understood so early on that the opportunity for a great horror experience like in other classics has already been sapped.

If you have/had a more positive reaction to the fundamentals of The Eight Pages than I did and just wanted some actual production qualities this time around then you’re in luck. While there are still a few flaws that seem to be inherent with Unity games in regards to control and response time, there’s certainly a quality craftsmanship to admire in shaping this into a full experience. A variety of settings between forests, a farming area, an underground mine, and more all effectively evoke a dreadful sense of atmosphere in different ways. The more open areas during the daytime do a great job in regards to aesthetic skill despite not going for high-quality textures. And though the jump scare implementation here can often feel artificial by design, the sound design, and the resulting tensity, of the video recorder getting obstreperous when Slender is near and the other qualities like a moody soundtrack do make it the standout quality of The Arrival overall.

When it’s all said and done, Slender: The Arrival is a frustrating horror game to examine because of how easy it is to complement the potatoes around this dish while finding the meat to be terribly under-cooked. I take issue with that core but I also don’t want to outright denigrate this revised product especially when time and effort went into the graphical, audio, and storytelling aspects. But when I’m left feeling more legitimate tension from a linear section of the game than the repeated trial-and-error collecting bits a part of my mind can’t help but wonder why that would be the case, even if the collecting bits are certainly still capable of making my palms sweat. The ten dollar retail price will probably hit that dollar-per-hour threshold for most, as it’s about two hours for a first play through, and there are additions like Hardcore Mode and secret tidbits that bolster its value.

Even with those considerations, the final result feels like a developer trying their best to pad out what's essentially a one-trick pony.

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