Slender: The Arrival gave me some of the hardest jump scares I’ve ever received since SCP-087. If you’re curious what I mean by that, it’s the kind of jump scares where you’re wound so tight that it’s physically painful when it happens. Darting around a house shutting windows and doors, only to find something that is going to kill me on contact standing directly beside me made for some moments where I really thought I was going to have to shut the game off. I didn’t think I could finish it, stopping the game several times to just take a break and hold my head in my hands. It is hard. It is soul-crushing. Playing through it is a tense, gut-wrenching ordeal of terror and sadness, and victory isn’t even close to guaranteed. If you really want to face the darkness, to challenge what waits for you in the void of night, then this game is mandatory.
The game is built upon Mark Hadley’s Slender: The Eight Pages, a game that deals with the modern folklore of the Slender Man mythos. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and looking into it is well worth your time if you love a good spooky story. You won’t need to have done that for playing Slender: The Arrival, but it will help fill in some confusing aspects of the story and make your playthrough much more interesting. I happily spent a few hours after I played it reading the lore and looking up theories on the game and its meanings.
That mainly comes from the game telling its story though letters and collectibles you can pick up. The game gives you a basic story about looking for a missing friend, but if that’s all you want to know about this game, then go to town. You’ll never be interrupted by a cutscene or annoying plot exposition. If you want to know more, there are lots of little objects and messages that explain the story as well as the history of the setting it’s taking place in. It skirts that perfect line between vague and meaningless, managing to sound intriguing while giving very little direct information about what’s going on. It kept me hooked on the story despite the game forcing me to seek out the story on my own. I felt like every clue really was earned, and it kept me engaged in seeing where it was all going. Fantastic stuff, and completely optional if you’re the type who doesn’t want their gameplay interrupted.
If you want those story items, you’d best be ready to earn them. If you have never played the original game, you should know that you’re up against something that will kill you the moment it makes contact with you. This creature doesn’t play fair, either, as it can teleport wherever it likes and tends to hang around anything important you’d need to do. Stepping anywhere near him will make your screen go haywire, filling with weird effects and disturbing imagery until you can get away from him. He is relentless, but seems to appear and disappear at random, backing off only to rush right at you again a few moments later. He will wear you down. He will break you. Then he will kill you.
This does result in a bit of trouble for the gameplay, though. In three of the main levels of the game your job is to collect or interact with a couple of things. They are scattered around large locations, and the game randomizes where they end up so don’t expect to look up an FAQ and find the best route to collect everything. Your best bet is to wander every area and hope you can find what you need before you’re caught and killed. The hard, and sometimes annoying, part of that is that you have large locations that you have to look through. With items hidden randomly over these large areas, you can spend ten to fifteen minutes looking for the stuff you need. The eight pages that are hidden in the second level are all quite small, and although they are pretty visible from a distance it is still pretty easy to overlook them. They’re placed on walls and poles, but you can often only see them from a certain angle, so you might pass them a few dozen times while scouring the location for the last one you need. This takes fear and shifts it into frustration as you try to give a location a solid search, then have to run off in some random direction to avoid Slender Man when he shows up.
This should have gotten easier in the next level when I had to start up some generators. I was pleased that I only had to turn on six of them, and that they were large and well-lit so they stood out. They were hidden in an indoor maze of sorts, though, one that I might have figured out if I’d had a moment’s peace from the creature that was chasing me. In this level, you aren’t chased by Slender Man, but by a creature known only as his Proxy. This thing isn’t quite as big on teleporting as Slender Man, but I have seen him appear out of thin air only a few feet away more than once. This thing will chase you down by running after you through the hallways, but you can stun it by shining your flashlight on it. This buys you a few seconds to turn some corners and hopefully lose it, but expect to hear its footsteps again very, very soon.
The act of looking around for items in confusing locations does make for a frightening experience. You never really know when one of those monsters is about to jump you, and just have to watch your surroundings for any changes. You’re forced to endure long searches when all you want to do is just run as fast as you can in any direction. It’s tense, but as you get lost and find yourself turning down the same halls over and over again looking for the one thing you missed, frustration will settle in. It’s in a few of those moments where I didn’t even try to hide from the creatures when they came around as I was too sick of my searches.
It’s funny, because after death I usually found that my frustration just trickled away. The game’s randomizaton can be surprisingly kind at times; dropping several items all in a small area. Also, the game may be random, but there really are only a few different places that it uses, so you learn most of the typical spots after a handful of deaths. It’s a game that you just have to learn over time, although some of those frequent deaths while finding what you need can be beyond aggravating. I really recommend pushing on through, although for me, my anger faded the moment I was dead and I was right back to playing it without even thinking about it.
I do have a genuine gripe with the game, and that’s opening and closing doors and windows. To do so, you have to click on them and then swipe in the right direction. It’s dodgy at best, and having to do it while Slender Man is on your tail is annoying. This game is already really, really hard, and having a command that doesn’t work half the time made one level far harder than it should have been. Clicking on the door or window should be enough to open or close it – simple as that.
Even so, the game’s quite hard to resist, as the atmosphere is delicious. Even in the waning daylight of the first area, the game starts playing with you. A lot of horror games go out of their way to make players aware of the sound of their own footsteps as they play, and I found every once in a while that if I stopped walking, I could hear footsteps behind me. This made me look back behind me a few times in the daytime, but once it got dark out, I never turned around to look again. There was never anything there the times I looked, but after a point I was too afraid of what I might see there if I did turn around. Instead, I just quietly quivered every time I heard the sound of heavy feet thumping against the ground.
Those aren’t even close to the only sounds that made me want to just curl into a ball and cry. There is one use of voice in the fourth level that made me want to mute it on repeat playthroughs, it was so frightening. Other voices will sometimes mutter in the darkness, never quite loud enough to hear. At another point, I heard a woman crying somewhere off in a pitch-black, burnt down home, and all I wanted to do was just run. There was nowhere else to go, though, and the only thing keeping me there was my pride. I could shut the game off when I wanted to, but I had to see things through. Other than that, the various sounds, mumbling voices, and cries in the dark make every moment of play one you earn by forcing yourself to continue.
The music played with my fears as well. I mentioned in my article on SCP-087, sound, as well as its absence, carries a lot of meaning with players. The use of sound is typically indicative of some change in scene or tone in any entertainment medium, and Slender: The Arrival plays this up hard. While on collection runs, the game will steadily add more to the music, making it more complex and menacing as you get further into the level. It may start off as a simple, sustained note meant to build up tension, but by the end it will have these constant hammering, thudding sounds that make it sound like something is not right behind you; it’s mere hairs from wrapping its hands around your throat. The music builds to such a fever pitch that I tended to be shaking from it by the level’s end as much as I was shaking from the presence of the monsters.
Being chased by those things nonstop means the fear doesn’t ever let up, either. They can show up just about anywhere, always working their way toward you without any sign of slowing down or letting up. I’ve seen Slender Man out of the corner of my eye, one hand so close it was almost touching me, my screen hissing and freaking out with imagery. From there, I’ve taken off running into the woods in the opposite direction, only to find him slowly floating toward me from that direction. Running from a creature can be frightening enough in a horror game, but being dogged by something that can be everywhere at once just takes your hope of winning and crushes it. Before long, it’s all you can do not to just stand where you are and scream at it to just get it over with. I’m sad to admit I did that more than once, essentially committing suicide because the pressure from the monster was too much. That’s goddamn scary.
That was frightening enough in the large, open field in the second level, but adding claustrophobia to the mix when you have to run through tight corridors makes it even worse. I never noticed that, even though I was afraid in the forest, I had tons of escape routes available to me. I’d often run into thick brush, getting myself disoriented and then killed, but at least then I could just tear off running as soon as I saw anything. In the tunnels, there’s really only one way to go to get away, and it’s beyond easy for the creatures to keep you in its sights. That’s not even factoring in the dead-ends — places that will make you sick to your stomach when you realize you HAVE to look in them when you’re looking for that last item you need. Hope you don’t get cut off, as the game does not care one bit if you ever finish it. It doesn’t play fair, and it doesn’t want you to have a happy ending. If you get by, it’s though sheer grit, iron nerves, and a ton of luck.
You may expect a game to play fair, though; to play by a set of even rules and stick to them. Like Knock Knock, it doesn’t care if you think it’s fair. If you come to it to be scared, you will be. You’ll be dogged by dangerous forces you can’t hope to fight, and avoiding them using your limited tools is all you can do. There will be many times when the game is just out to get you, and it builds up a hopelessness in you as you play it, using that feeling to make it easier and easier to frighten you. I was a broken, easy-to-startle mess by its end, and if you stick with it, you will be too. Fighting back against an enemy that seems to be everywhere while you’re weaving through tight hallways in a house, only to have it just come through a door and grab you isn’t fair, but it will leave you shaking and screaming.
There are a couple of difficulty levels if you do find it’s being a little too hard on you, but I didn’t notice much appreciable difference between them except for the fact that you can survive multiple attacks from the Proxy in the third level. Go into this game knowing it’s not going to be easy, but you can persevere if you keep at it. It’s unfair, but not merciless. Eventually the things you need will fall into place, either by learning the environment perfectly or by getting a lucky streak of nearby objects, and you will get through.
If you really want to feel scared – feel genuine terror even though it’s only digital monsters chasing an avatar, you have to get Slender: The Arrival. It doesn’t play fair from a gameplay stance and that might not sit well with some, but to be truly scared of something, you can’t know or understand it. You can figure out enough about the monsters in this game to get by them and finish it, but each win will be just barely, scraped together and earned through skill and luck. Whether you win or lose, you will be left panting, shivering, and jumping at shadows for days after. This game’s fear doesn’t just go away when you shut the game off; it’ll follow you all the way to your bed that night as you look out that slit in your curtains, thinking you see the shape of a pure white face staring back at you.
You can buy Slender: The Arrival for the best $9.99 a horror fan could ever spend on Steam and the developer’s site.
