The Haunted Hoard: Slender: The Arrival (PS3)

The rise of Slender Man as a horror icon is a fascinating one, the history of this tall faceless figure in a suit easy to trace and yet still able to make some believe he’s a true monster lurking in our world. Beginning as a character created for a paranormal Photoshop contest on the Something Awful forums, Slender Man would go on to rise in popularity as fan works like the Youtube video series Marble Hornets and the internet urban legends known as creepypasta built their fiction around the character. However, before he became big enough for even a feature film, one of Slender Man’s breakthrough moments was when a simple free indie horror game spread through the internet like wildfire. Slender, later renamed Slender: The Eight Pages, managed surprising success with its simple idea of a supernatural figure chasing you through the woods at night, but despite its fame and importance, Slender is technically an incomplete game. Almost a year after Slender’s beta captivated the internet, a full game was released known as Slender: The Arrival, adding a lot more content and story to the experience to flesh it out.

Quite wisely, the heart of the original beta is still present in Slender: The Arrival and iterated upon in a few different ways. Slender: The Arrival is a first person survival horror game where its standout chapters are the ones where you find yourself wandering through a dark area in search of a selection of eight objects. These can be things like papers posted up in the woods at night warning of the Slender Man or a set of generators in a cramped interior area you need to activate to escape, but however they manifest, they all have one simple but surprisingly effective premise at heart. As you explore these areas, things start off quiet save for the sound of your footsteps, the only light being that projected by your flashlight that perhaps bobs a bit too much as you move. Random little noises of nature or strange shuffling sounds might make you jumpy, but as you head out and find your first object of importance, things seem relatively safe and mundane.

Soon though, a figure out of the corner of your eye will appear in the distance. With the appearance of Slender Man comes a visual distortion, your character deciding to record their entire experience on camera for some reason and the appearance of the otherworldly figure leading to graphical disruptions that can easily put you on edge. If you avert your gaze you might be safe so long as you aren’t too close, but if you need to start sprinting, this makes Slender Man more aggressive, teleporting around the area to try and catch you off guard. The closer he is the more the visual effects grow, and as you hurry about the area, he becomes less and less subtle. Leaving your flashlight on and running puts you at greater risk, but if you can avoid him these tools can still be used reasonably well. If you press your luck too much though you might run yourself right into the open arms of the nightmarish figure.

One of the ways the game manages to make this heart-pounding without being frustrating tie not to the effective visual and audio chaos that grows in intensity over the course of these chapters, but to the task at hand. Collecting eight pages or activating eight generators is a small enough goal that it isn’t too unfortunate when you die and need to retry the challenge, but it’s just enough that losing still has a palpable degree of regret. The placement of the items is randomly picked from some preset options, the forest and interior area both alleviating some of that randomness by always having the pool of available locations be from a set of landmarks or distinct spots in the environment. The generator chapter definitely makes more use of confusing hallways and dead end rooms that make you worry you’ll be ambushed as you check them, but it’s easy to get a feel for the kind of places the machines will be tucked away after you find a few. In the forest, the landmarks are much more apparent but can involve actions like entering a claustrophobic building where the dread of being cornered grows with each turn or they might be positioned on the other side of something and your attempt to look for it instead gets you a faceful of a faceless man.

Rushing about, wondering if you need to preserve your stamina or turn off your flashlight, and hoping you don’t lose your bearings as you seek out that last important item can lead to intense moments where the fear of having to repeat the segment is almost as strong as the atmosphere of the moment. Admittedly, the graphics in Slender: The Arrival are rather rudimentary, this particularly bad during the chapters where you are wandering around exploring an area and might come across a pitifully rendered burning corpse, but most of the atmospheric touches are strong enough to make up for the fact things look amateurish at close range. Slender Man isn’t the only figure who will chase you either, a figure in a hoodie known online as The Chaser adding a second killer to escape during the generator search that makes things even more stressful in an interesting way. The Chaser actively charges at you if they spot you but can be put off by focusing your flashlight’s beam, and while they don’t always instantly kill you when they catch you, they can eventually do you in or herd you into Slender Man’s arms instead. The unfortunate thing about The Chaser is that they leap onto you to slice you apart and you get a look at their face that is a bit too badly rendered for its uncanny appearance to land effectively, but the feel of the threats in the game often make up for the graphical flaws.

Slender: The Arrival also knows not to overuse this formula. While you can find the original Slender beta recreated as an extra bonus for beating the game that uses the same eight page formula as the game’s second chapter, many of the other chapters in Slender: The Arrival focus more on exploration and building tension for these more extreme moments of escaping danger. The game starts with a girl named Lauren turning up at the house of her friend Kate only to find the place empty and in disarray, messages scrawled about warning of an unusual figure. These images and disturbed rants will become more and more familiar as Lauren heads out into the woods to follow their trail, the warnings about Slender Man and his dark intentions growing in intensity and insanity as you come closer to the truth. While some of these chapters really are closer to what you’d see in narrative exploration games rather than survival horror, there are portions where you might suddenly need to run for your life or you might run into Slender Man or something else terrifying if you head off the beaten path in search of some of the game’s notes and hidden secrets.

Slender: The Arrival’s original release is different from what we have now, and it seems most of the changes to the game panned out as strict improvements. If only the base game’s chapters were all that was available, the story behind Slender Man and a few other associated characters would feel rather sparse, the scrawling on the walls and eerie notes not quite building up enough of a legend or motivation behind the monster you’re contending with the whole game. However, a few extra chapters were slipped in, one requiring you to find a teddy bear in the woods so you can experience the terror of being one of the children Slender Man leads away from their families and another featuring perhaps the most important chapter story wise in the form of a character exploring a farmstead. Not only does this chapter do a lot more to explain what Slender Man might be without ruining the mystery of his existence, but it provides its own chase segments that break from the collection formula for something blood-pumping between moments of quiet exploration. If you don’t find certain notes or accidentally skip the optional chapters then Slender: The Arrival’s story will likely still feel like it has holes that invite confusion rather than interesting speculation, but it does feel like, in its current form, Slender: The Arrival has enough to make it an engaging horror title even if it shouldn’t have hidden some of its vital explanations on plot matters.

THE VERDICT: Slender: The Arrival found a remarkably simple but effective form of building tension but had the restraint to not overuse it. When a chapter asks you to find eight pages or generators, the structure of the challenge manages risk and player patience well. Those pulse-pounding moments where you just need to find the last item to escape as you can feel the threats closing in are incredibly effective, and the level of randomization at play ensures you can’t just breeze your way through these tense moments. Chapters between to build up the legend of Slender Man and establish a creepy atmosphere help keep things balanced and not too intense so that the dangerous moments have more impact. While the game does have some subpar graphics that hurt the effectiveness of some moments and some useful story info can be missed, Slender: The Arrival builds a nice horror tale to attach its excellent collection challenges to.

And so, I give Slender: The Arrival for PlayStation 3…

A GOOD rating. Many years ago I gave the Slender beta a look, and it didn’t immerse me nearly as well as Slender: The Arrival did. Finding all eight objects and escaping here isn’t the end goal of this game but part of making further progress, Slender Man standing in your way not only as a terrifying force sold well by the distortions surrounding his appearance but by restricting you from pushing deeper into this horror experience. Giving more context to why the events are happening does a lot to make the experience feel more meaningful as well, and not knowing if the area you’re entering next is a dangerous one or one where you learn more about this paranormal threat means things can remain tense even during the exploratory chapters. Even if you prefer the simplicity of the original Slender, you have the remade version available for play and a similar concept near the start of the game before things really get rolling, and with how the balance works out and the randomization feeds into making it different every time it can still be tense to replay those portions. It really is a shame that some characters like The Chaser or the burned body can look so rough when the game can do a lot of its atmospheric details rather well, but if you accept this is a game on a budget, you can still find a survival horror game that has some remarkably effective moments of building dread and enough story substance if you poke around a bit for it.

Developed by the creators of the original Slender beta with the help of Slender Man’s creator Eric Knudson and the creators of the Marble Hornets webseries, this might be the most concentrated meeting of the minds behind this horror icon of the 2010s. While it took a few updates to get there and still has some rough visuals at parts, Slender: The Arrival truly does do the character justice and provides a simple but effective take on the survival horror genre thanks to its atmosphere, lore, and well-balanced stakes.