By Jim Rossignol on February 11th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.
A couple of people (thanks!) forwarded me the Slender: The Arrival beta footage which I’ve posted below. I watched it, not knowing what to expect, but in hindsight I realise I should have known exactly what to expect, which is a lot of stumbling about in the dark with a flashlight, as the game slowly raises a battery of terrifying drones and horrifying Slender Man images to daunt you as you progress.
A one trick pony, perhaps, but it’s a fucking nightmarish pony. The beta comes with 50%-off pre-orders, which are available now.
11/02/2013 at 13:06 RedViv says:
I’ll never get tired of primal terror.
11/02/2013 at 13:07 Safewood says:
This game seems to have a far too slender array of mechanics for my taste.
11/02/2013 at 13:10 RedViv says:
True, maybe a new game with crafting aspects would be good, making candles to explore a cursed cove.
11/02/2013 at 13:47 Bluerps says:
Actually, I think they should add a way to defeat Slenderman. A way to Secure and Contain him somehow, and Protect the world from him.
11/02/2013 at 18:04 Grey Ganado says:
Has there ever Ben a good Slenderman game?
14/02/2013 at 06:25 Razumen says:
I’d sure hate to be there when a Containment Breach happens…
11/02/2013 at 13:21 Scumbag says:
They possibly thinned out the features to keep it trim.
11/02/2013 at 15:18 Gap Gen says:
It’s not its strongest suit, I agree.
11/02/2013 at 16:41 Muzman says:
That’s not a long limb you’re out on. Only a bald faced liar would say it’s complex
12/02/2013 at 15:15 AccidentalAcrophobia says:
I think you just need to Go to Sleep.
11/02/2013 at 13:14 Hoaxfish says:
Which “Slender” is this? Because all I remember is there was a whole wave of the same crap after that first game came out.
11/02/2013 at 13:40 Gabbo says:
I do believe this descended from the flashlight in woods-look for notebook pages game that ushered in the wave.
11/02/2013 at 13:27 Gurrah says:
Pants will be shat.
11/02/2013 at 13:51 Llewyn says:
Unfortunately Notch has ensured that will not be the case.
11/02/2013 at 20:17 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
Now, where did I put that bag of milky ways?
11/02/2013 at 13:35 maninahat says:
The shaky camera thing looks as annoying as hell. I feel it undermines the foreboding and trepidation by letting you know exactly when the slender man is around and when to run. This isn’t like SCP 87, wherein there is no way of knowing when you are about to die, but there is ten minutes of sweating it out first.
11/02/2013 at 13:47 TheIronSky says:
Agreed. Although the actual concept of “a man who is both slender and seemingly omnipotent in your journey through this darkened region” is not as scary as “a man who is slender who will end your journey to collect 8 overly-cryptic pages.”
The fact that he’s trying to end your game is scary enough without the crappy sound and visual design choices.
11/02/2013 at 14:15 UmmonTL says:
Exactly what I think, I couldn’t even get through the video without getting headaches. They should have kept it to increasingly bad digital aritfacts that actually look like a camera/electronics malfunction. That wobbling is just silly.
Also these effects that are supposed to obscure the horror you’re facing so he’s more scary really doesn’t work if everybody already knows how he looks.
11/02/2013 at 13:40 Inigo says:
Or you could save your money and wait until a shrieking retard makes a Let’s Play video of it.
11/02/2013 at 13:57 dE says:
Bro, Dude… totally subscribe and comment, it really helps me out, bro!
12/02/2013 at 01:55 zbeeblebrox says:
Bro, do me a huge favor and break that Like button bro! Bro it totally helps me out!
11/02/2013 at 13:42 Michael Fogg says:
Running around Skyrim on a beaten PS3?
11/02/2013 at 13:45 JKjoker says:
i still dont see the point of the videogame flashlight, why not have it work consistently ?
slenderman is also a lot harder to see because it now blends with the background which i doubt is intended
to be honest i think the game would be scarier with a lighting style like the initial picture of the article
11/02/2013 at 13:50 TheIronSky says:
You are the second person that I 100% agree with. Are you, perhaps, thinking exactly what I’m thinking!?
11/02/2013 at 14:16 JKjoker says:
Uh, I think so, but we’ll never get a monkey to use dental floss.
11/02/2013 at 23:23 Josh W says:
Shame I can’t get your names to fit to the tune.
11/02/2013 at 13:53 TheTingler says:
I agree with a lot of the points here, they’ve haven’t really taken Slender and made a game of it yet.
Nevertheless I still jumped out of my seat at 03:55.
11/02/2013 at 14:07 Knufinke says:
So it’s still the same shitty uninspired tech demo with better graphics.
11/02/2013 at 14:07 DestructibleEnvironments says:
Am I the only one that is completely tired of games that are so dark that you have to play the whole game through a flashlight? Nobody liked it in Doom 3 either. It’s such a dull and lazy way to create a horror game.
PS: While the Silent hill games were super dark too, they had the amazing art to back it up. They weren’t THAT dark too.
11/02/2013 at 16:42 Wedge says:
You could play them with your flashlight off, and it was generally recommendable to do so, as this made you largely invisible to enemies.
12/02/2013 at 00:11 Stevostin says:
Actually while watching it I though it was far to lighten to be believable. Maybe we should both adjust our gamma ?
11/02/2013 at 14:11 Sardonic says:
I can’t wait for all the great retsupuraes this game is going to spawn.
11/02/2013 at 14:42 CaLe says:
I just played through it and got 6 pages before he had his way with me. Very tense stuff. I’m unable to be scared by movies, but games like this and Amnesia really get me.
11/02/2013 at 16:01 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
There’s something missing in these Slender games, that added a lot to the early marble hornet videos. Slight distortions of video and audio only meant that something was nearby. It wasn’t until you were staring at a paused screen for a few seconds, that you would suddenly notice that “That isn’t a tree, it’s a freaking….man…”
Or was that just me?
11/02/2013 at 16:45 RedViv says:
Yes, the first Parsec Slender was trying to do that from what I gather, but did only manage to get in rudimentary similarities in the flora to confuse the player. I do hope they can put far more of it in this follow-up, maybe not merely spawning the creature somewhere around the player. The distortions are a good start, as well as the headcam perspective.
Don’t even need to start speaking of the lesser clones, worst of all those that didn’t really get the creature at all and just abused it for jump scares. Tut-tut, people.
11/02/2013 at 18:25 MiloticMaster says:
Totally agree with you, its never ‘seeing’ Slender that scared me, it was knowing that Slender could see me, and I couldnt see him. I would wave the flashlight around trying to spot him first, then suddenly static would start to appear, and then I run frantically.
The video distortion is very nice, but they need to work more on the environment and getting the game to unnerve you rather than scare you.
12/02/2013 at 02:03 zbeeblebrox says:
You know what would make a REALLY great slenderman game? A game that bills itself as something else entirely, thats super-benign like a collectathon or a cutesy 3d platformer, but unbeknownst to the player, Slenderman watches you from the shadows and slowly turns the game nightmarish.
Thats the proper way to follow the spirit of the various YouTube series that made him popular. It was all about genre subversion and misdirection.
11/02/2013 at 16:01 MrBillwulf says:
I tend to be more frightened by the Outsider in Dishonored. Slender relies on startling the player, which can work, but gets old after awhile. The ambiguity of the Outsider’s motives, however, always creeped me out.
11/02/2013 at 16:33 RedViv says:
Well, this creature is equally ambiguous, though to say that the games until now were light on the narrative would be a colossal understatement. Truly exploring a constantly changing mythos would be hard.
11/02/2013 at 16:03 ArtyFishal says:
Am I the only person that thinks these Slender games, really, really suck? Like they are bottom of the barrel, common denominator, unimaginative, jump-scare, cheap shit?
11/02/2013 at 17:40 Eukatheude says:
Welcome to the club.
11/02/2013 at 18:29 Davie says:
You’re *never* the only person.
11/02/2013 at 19:31 SuperNashwanPower says:
INDIE, which is an acronym for “INcapable of Doing It Erroneously”
12/02/2013 at 09:06 strangeloup says:
I didn’t think the Marble Hornets videos that started, or at least popularised, the whole thing were much cop either. Like a sort of student knockoff of Blair Witch; not that Blair Witch is exactly a masterpiece, but it seemed like that was what they were trying to emulate.
11/02/2013 at 17:33 Oasx says:
Given that they hired the Marble Hornets guys to do the story, it seems strange that it looks like the old game just with better graphics. As i understand it there was zero story in that game.
11/02/2013 at 17:40 TrueBlue says:
Again with the overuse of sounds to create a tense ambiance, it didn’t work with Doom 3 nor with Dead Space, despite some people’s opinion, as it detracts from the situation at hand, and it becomes more of a way for the sound to showcase itself rather than to add something to the overall experience.
I honestly don’t know how do you find this type of stuff scary, especially when things get extremely loud with all those audio filters being played at the same time, with a ever increasing volume, instead I would bet that having no sound effects nor ambient soundtrack would add a more credible, not to mention terrifying, feel to an already tired concept, but that’s just me though.
11/02/2013 at 23:27 Josh W says:
I personally react really well to ominous and unexpected audio cues, and had a great time playing the first dead space on maximum difficulty with a great big base speaker. I was really bad at it, which improved the effect.
13/02/2013 at 13:44 TrueBlue says:
As I shortly mentioned, it ends up, in these type of games, and even on the case of Doom 3 or Dead Space, to be a scare more focused on the “jump music” than on the the event itself, and on those type of games the music, for the most part, overstays it’s welcome and ends up being more of a case of a show off from the sound designer than a very well elaborate sequence, again play games like SCP for example that rarely , if ever, use sound cues or ever increasingly louder ambient musics to alert or scare the player even more, notice how much praise those games get, with good reason, for adding a relative realistic scenario that doesn’t force themselves to use traditional video games or even interactive media tropes to fright the player.
12/02/2013 at 01:10 wodin says:
Disagree…sound is very important in all horror films..watch a film that you find scary with no sound..it isn’t scary anymore, same with games..I sat through the vid above with no sound and wasn’t scared in the slightest..
13/02/2013 at 13:33 TrueBlue says:
Again I don’t agree, yes, I’m not saying that sound isn’t important but there is a lack of distinction between using sound appropriately and overusing it, the latter is very prominently obvious with these type of games, also your comparison about movies is limited, there are a good deal of films that lack ambient sound whatsoever and that addition, or lack thereof, improves the creepiness factor ten fold, by not making you anticipate what’s coming or by not making the scare so focused on the “jump music” that it’s being played, also movies are not games, play SCP for example and notice how ambient sound is very rarely used throughout the whole game, and notice how that makes a greater impact on the player than your typical Sender game.
11/02/2013 at 18:53 maninahat says:
What was the name of that horror game in development? The one in the subway station which keeps playing tricks on the eye – with different messages appearing on signs depending on where you look, or mysterious figures moving in distant dark shadows? Now that one looked creepy as hell, without resorting to creepy pasta plundering, jump scare, booga booga bullshit.
11/02/2013 at 22:00 maninahat says:
Oh, that’s right. “Montas”.
11/02/2013 at 19:27 SuperNashwanPower says:
What’s great is that we’ve had all these damn shooters, with identical brotagonists saving the world from the evil russian muslim guy with an eyepatch. How bored we became of the same formula again and again, and proclaimed it stale and manipulative.
Thankfully we have Indie companies and Steam Greenlighters / Modders ALL making Slender games, which in no way whatsoever repeat the very same thing over and over and over again to the point where you always know whats going to happen. It is the very pinnacle of evolution and innovation. The moment they could be accused of just doing minor variations on a theme with only the barest of inventiveness displayed, as we did those soulless mega-corporations who pumped pixellated testosterone down our nostrils for a decade, we would call those feckless, lazy indies out. Oh yes.
Thankfully our boys don’t need it. Never have I seen a flashlight with that particular bulb pattern in ANY slender game ever. Bleeding edge.
11/02/2013 at 20:36 zeekthegeek says:
I still can’t find anywhere they indicate they have Victor Surge’s permission to use Slenderman. He holds all commercial rights to the character he created. This is worse than piracy, this is for-profit copyright infringement assuming they do not have it.
11/02/2013 at 21:42 Sunjammer says:
Slenderman is fricking dumb and anyone scared of “him” must have a spectacularly low boo-threshold. Just an awful, awful idea. Oh he has long arms and no face. Ugh. Who caaaares. Is THIS the monster we want our youngins to respect?
11/02/2013 at 23:28 Josh W says:
I think it’s how you tell it.
12/02/2013 at 02:10 Tomac says:
Oh goodness, i’m a big baby when it comes to horror games. Just watching that video was pretty intense.
12/02/2013 at 02:31 Numerical says:
Rename it to Run, Bitch, Run! and I’ll think about buying it.
Seriously though, maybe I’m not understanding the mythos here but what do pieces of paper have to do with outwitting this critter? Just seems like a novelty game you’ll beat in a couple of hours and never look at again. I.E. waste of cash.
12/02/2013 at 09:21 strangeloup says:
I think the only reason I made it all the way through the video is because it seemed like they were going to reach some kind of critical mass of horror clichés per minute of footage.
Slenderman is a rubbish baddie.
12/02/2013 at 09:37 jrodman says:
IMO slenderman was pretty good when he was still being.. discovered. Ill defined and defying logic, the creep-factor was there.
Once he became *specific* and definite, it fell apart entirely.
12/02/2013 at 16:13 Spoon Of Doom says:
Late to the party, apologies. I never understood where this Slender Man craze came from – I had never heard of him, but suddenly there were all those near-identical games popping up, GIFs and similar stuff posted every where, even a Slenderman song… But it all seems very unimaginative one-trick-pony-esque to me. Is there any deeper, maybe even interesting mythology I’m missing? And, more specifically, is there anything differentiating this game from the one hundred boo-fests featuring him, a flashlight and some incoherent ramblings on pages that are for some reason nailed to trees, walls and probably squirrels in the environment?
That said, I can imagine one Slenderman game that I’d like: Reverse the roles. Have some NPCs wandering around in the dark, and you have to seperate them and scare them shitless by various means before finally killing them. Someone much more clever than me could maybe even make the concept work in multiplayer.
14/02/2013 at 06:41 Razumen says:
Whatever happened to that multiplayer slenderman game that was being made? That one sounded like they were actually taking the idea one step further, this just looks like a HD remake of the original, which while not a bad thing, may not be enough to warrant a $10 purchase.
16/03/2013 at 22:59 Arrowboy says:
Ok, everyone seems to be raging against the game already. It’s only in Beta! The final game isn’t finished yet. There will be a story, more enemies, and different game mechanics.Yes, the Slender games are repetitive, but give this one a chance. Also, to all of those who say slenderman isn’t scary, you obviously only heard about him after the game came out. Before everyone knew about him he was a legitimately scary monster. He’s only lost that because of his popularity.