‘Slender: The Arrival’ Review Roundup


Slender: The Arrival has hit the PC to mixed reviews. See what the critics had to say.

Slender: The Eight Pages was a low-definition free-to-play horror game that was as scary as it was simple. It stuck you in a forest with a flashlight and little else, and you had to wander the forest looking for the eight pages. Sounds easy, right? Well, the catch is that the horror villain Slender Man, inspired by the YouTube channel MarbleHornets, is after you. Slender Man is a creature with what appears to be a blank white head and no face, who wears a black business suit and tie and has arms and legs inhumanly long. Occasionally, you see him with multiple arms resembling some creature from some obscure mythology.

He doesn’t kill you like most horror villains do. You have to look at him for long enough to have him “hypnotize” you. Then you get a screen full of static with nothing but Slender Man‘s “face” in the middle, and the game is over. It’s implied that he’s hugging you and sucking the life out of you. There were spinoffs that were all freeware and gave you different environments in which to outwit the faceless terror.

The next game in the series was Haunt: The Real Slender Game, which gave us better graphics and a more complicated task of collecting the pages.

Slender: The Arrival is the first game in the series that will actually cost you something to play ($10 for the game itself, $20 for the game and bonus material), and depending on how much you liked the previous titles, it may or may not be worth your time and money.

The world he haunts is larger and denser. Slender: The Arrival takes you out of the familiar forest and puts you in abandoned homes, mines, and hillsides in broad daylight. Developer Blue Isle went out of their way to make the visuals and sounds as approachable as possible, but they forgot to give us a reason to replay the game, other than to try your luck again.

There is a great deal more story involved in this outing, as you wander your friend’s house and find clues left throughout about who Slender Man is. Suddenly you hear screaming outside and you rush out to see what it was. Then the game begins where everyone is familiar with it.

Much like in the original game you are almost completely defenseless, which is why Slender Man is considered one of the scariest villains in horror games. All you can do is run as you try to find the pages, and that gets repetitive quickly if you’re beaten it already. It can be finished in 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing.

What do you think of Slender: The Arrival?

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