Ben Rayner reviews Slender: The Arrival…
By now the tales of Slender Man are a world-wide phenomenon. Perhaps due to it’s simplicity, telling the tale of an oddly tall being that never speaks and can appear anywhere at any time, it captured the fragile fear of everyone. Especially those smaller and younger humans we often see running around buildings filled with teachers.
After a multitude of video games doc using on this creepy pasta tale, perhaps one of the better incarnations, Slender: The Arrival, has finally made the jump to Nintendo’s Wii U console, and after some serious time with it, I can confirm that not only is it scary as hell (I don’t say that lightly, as someone who survived Outlast and loved PT) but it also has the tendency to turn your fear into seething rage at just how easily Slender Man can end your adventures and often infuriate you more so than anything else.
As you begin your journey, finding your way through a creepy forest from the site of your seemingly crashed vehicle, you’ll be occasionally shocked into paying attention when the screen flashes with distortion and the gamepad trembles in your palms. Warning you that you’ve caught sight of Slender Man.
More often than not, you’ve not been aware of it so you panic. Panning around trying to catch a glimpse, but nothing. This growing panic it instills is a rush and one that makes it all the harder for you to complete the task at hand. Running doesn’t help as much as you might initially expect though, with Slender Man able to change position at will, you could run a mile then spin round only to find him face to face in front of you.
Instead, the environments at hand are your best tool to defend yourself as each plays like a fairly confusing, yet self-contained maze. All your horror tropes are there. Creepy abandoned mines, houses that are huge and eery even your classic dark forest with trees so dense you can’t see the forest for them. I’ll stress they’re not the most difficult, but offer just enough challenge that if you need to run in the middle of completing a task, you might struggle to get back to your start point. Thankfully this works in your favour on occasion and makes it that harder for slender man or his minions to grab hold of you.
I’m sure by now you’re wondering why I keep mentioning tasks. Well, it’s not just an experience but a game so you’ll have jobs to do, each slightly different depending on the area and none really explained to you. So in the interest of keeping spoilers to a minimum I’ll shoot you a few examples but not too many. The house you’ll arrive at first, old, abandoned, trashed in every room with drawings of Slender Man all over the walls, offers you a flashlight and a few scares before you stumble across a key and realise all doors and windows need to be closed and in the woods you’ll need to find eight pieces of paper that.. well. I’ll leave you to discover the rest but no matter how many times you complete the game, tasks are dotted about at random so you’ll never do everything in the same order twice.
Hopefully you’ve got some idea of just how horrible an opponent Slender Man is, with the stress of his impending arrival, breathing down your neck at all times but just to makes things worse, you’ll find other enemies out for your skin too. Slender Man has the ability to create Proxies who will do his bidding, with one of the creepy being The Chaser from the mines. Wearing a hood and mask, covered in blood and covered in what looks to be oil, she’s fast and dangerous. Having to listen to her extremely fast footsteps, echoing around me seriously frayed my nerves as I tried to get some generators going. Eventually you’ll come across her weakness which thank the gods is an aversion to the light meaning a focused beam from your torch will give you the edge to run away, or finish the job you’re doing and then sprint off into the moonlight.
Slender: The Arrival isn’t a perfect experience by any stretch of the imagination. The graphics are fairly average and on my run through I noticed a fair amount of glitching, including getting stuck in walls or more rarely, enemies such as The Chaser getting locked in an object.
Tension is a bit of a problem too, eventually causing fatigue with such high tension throughout, making those scary moments when Slender Man grabs you or a Proxy finishes you off turning into frustrating full stops to your chances of completing a task. On a few occasions I went down the cheap victory route and chose to start a task then run in a wide circle when I though I was in danger only to come back and swiftly finish the job.
The Arrivals sound track down a lot of work to make up for it’s other issues. Constantly turning the dial-up on the atmosphere. Sound effects play a great balancing act also, giving you just enough intrigue from distant growling, heavy breathing and voices that seem to pass through you, to make you too frightened to push on but too curious not to.
Best experienced through headphones, you’ll feel the game’s soundtrack slowly bring itself to the boil, increasing in intensity as Slender draws closer.
All in all, Slender: The Arrival is a great horror title, one that benefits from the chance to expand upon its lore and core ideas. Enemies are frightening and never stop coming, making the eternal fear they offer all the more intense, yet with enough curiosities to keep you digging deeper into the games environments The Arrival makes for an addictive experience. Just try not to get too frustrated, it’s only a game after all and Slender Man isn’t real..or is he?
Rating: 7/10
Ben Rayner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=W04aXcyQ0NQ
