Game Review: Slender

Very rarely do I find a game that can genuinely scare me. I’ve always enjoyed horror games, feeling the occasional tingle of fear when playing Silent Hill and the creepy scares that come with playing Amnesia, but Slender has to be right up there on the scare scale. This game had me literally jumping away from the computer, yanking out my earphones.

Slender, developed by ParsecProductions is based on the webseries Marble Hornets and has caused a stir across several websites, especially in social networking, with Facebook pages developing memes specific to the game.

Slender takes a simple approach to the horror/survival gaming experience, which I felt ParsecProductions molded magnificently to create the game’s feeling of impending dread. The game opens to the title sequence with the sound of footsteps on a gravel/dirt path and the rattle of a fence. It’s nighttime, a flashlight switches on brightly and the instructions to the game appear as nothing more than “collect all 8 pages”. From there the game begins. You are to find the pages and try to escape Slender Man.

While the game causes players to feel uneasy as they search for the pages, the gameplay and storyline, or should I say lack thereof, is incredibly basic. Because of this, a player can find they are uninspired in playing the game. There is only so long you can jog around the world, searching for the pages before you start to wonder ‘what’s the point of this? Who is this character I’m playing anyway?’ and find yourself becoming less immersed in Slender.  

It most certainly is not a game that everyone can enjoy. It relies a lot on prior knowledge to Marble Hornets. Also the horror theme of the game where you find yourself scared senseless also isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea either. 

For those who do stick it out through the game and reach the final page, I have to wonder; did Slender Man appear and kill you too? Or is that just what happened to me and the friends I have spoken to that also reach the 8^th page? I can’t even really describe the frustration I felt dying in the end after spending time to find the other 7 pages and nursing my several small heart attacks I seemed to experience throughout the game. 

Overall, the game certainly has an impressive scare factor to it, but aside from that, there really isn’t a whole lot to the game. The lack of storyline and gameplay options can becoming boring quite quickly, so I wouldn’t blame someone for giving up midway through the game because they just got too fed up to play through it. 

Because of how creepy the game is despite the lack of storyline, I’m going to give it a 5/10 for effectively freaking me out.

-Laura