Slender - A Short Review

Slender.

Just the name of it sounds scary. Like a hideously withdrawn, stick-thin, pseudoscientific 'nutritionist' bint, with more bone than meat to her composition, about to tell you how to change your diet so you can be just as ghostly and soulless as her.

Slender.

Sounds like a brand of artificial sweetener that aforementioned nagging bint would recommend you use because sugar is bad for you.

Slender.

Like trying to say 'surrender' when you can't speak, because you haven't eaten properly for two weeks on the advice of someone with a PhD from the internet, and the mouth cancer your artificial sweetener caused!

SLENDER!

It sounds creepy!

For those who do not know, Slender (or Slender: The Eight Pages - as the current working title is) is a free, first person horror game currently in beta - From Parsec Productions. It first came to my attention by watching notoriously glorious, infamous, misogynistic viking and King of Sweden, Robbaz play it. I thought little of it at the time, but then, like Slenderman in the game, the game itself seemed to pop up and gaze at me wherever I turned.

The premise is quite simple. You, in some woods, with a flashlight. You find creepy hand drawn/written notes, and you are chased by what looks like a faceless version of that long armed waiter from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life "I wonder where that fish did go!?"

...That's it, pretty much. No deep, intense psychological tests and manipulation á la Silent Hill. No needless hordes of zombies á la Resident Evil. No immense plot, no sense of claustrophobia, no subtle trickery. Just you, in the dark, being followed.

I'm going to tell you something about so called 'scary' games. They don't scare me. I'm going to tell you something about Slender. It scares the living fuck out of me! It seems to tap in to a primal instinct to look for danger. You can't look at Slenderman - that's how he gets you...BUT YOU HAVE TO! You need to look around, you need to find the pages and part of you, a tiny, curious part of you knows he may be there - and dares you to look. You don't hear footsteps behind you, but you know he's there. He's everywhere. A tree pops into your peripheral vision and you give a little start thinking 'Oh God! I thought that was Slenderman!' - Your vision gets all interfered with when he's nearby. Like static on a television. But when that happens, you don't stop and run. You turn...You look. You have to...And you hope you don't see him, but know you will and when you do your heart races. I am not kidding. Play this, at night, alone and with the lights off.

What makes it creepier? Slenderman does not move. Slenderman does not run after you. Slenderman pursues you inactively. He is there, and he will get you. Like the grim spectre of death, he lingers and merely waits for the moment. He doesn't have to hunt you, you will go to him eventually. There is a creepy, horribly primal thing with this game. The simplicity of it and lack of characterisation is all the immersion you need. You feel the helplessness, you feel the hopelessness, you feel the fear as if you were actually in this situation. Or, at least, I did...and it's rare for me to do so for a 'scary' videogame.

So, if you like a good fear-based thrill, check out Slender - It is free, it is good, it is fun and it is, for me, genuinely quite scary.

Slender: The Eight Pages by Parsec Productions