Review: The gaming is thin in free survival horror Slender: The Eight Pages

Slenderman's hipster-Frankenstein genesis as a haunted-Polaroid Photoshop contest winner has spawned an unexpectedly popular homebrew horror cottage industry. Slenderman: The Eight Pages explores the self-styled urban legend as a short-form first-person survival game, and the result is a mildly diverting proof-of-concept piece that meets its meager goals, but fails to match the creativity and impact found elsewhere in the Slenderman mythos.

It's not a bad view, but get used to it, since there isn't much else to see.

For the uninitiated: Slenderman is a distorted, faceless, man in black who stalks people and makes them disappear. For a supernatural entity, Slender is pretty sloppy with his abductions, leaving behind a handy mountain of photo and video evidence for endless posts on places like YouTube.

Find eight of these, and you're home free.

Slenderman stories brush aside traditional narrative forms and are told via found footage, snapshots, message board threads, audio recordings and similar interlocking sources using a technique called Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). Imagine a crowd-sourced Blair Witch, served up as digital performance art, and you're on the right track.

It's odd then, to find this risk-taking attitude and creative spirit completely absent in Slender: The Eight Pages. Gameplay is pared down to 3D-engine-bound first-person survival basics, with WASD motion keys and controls for a flashlight and camera zoom. You've got two speeds for motion, slow and slower, the first accompanied by impaired lighting in a failed gambit to add tension.

Milk carton, here I come.

There are no weapons, no hit points, no inventory, no crouching to hide or any other forms of entertainment to interrupt the purity of the experience, which boils down to collecting eight pages nailed to things scattered throughout the dark woods before Slenderman catches up with you. This is presumably a horrible event, but since we don't get to see anything past a fuzzy static fadeout, who knows? Audio cues and visual distortions alert you to his presence, allowing you a window to escape, but as you collect more pages this window narrows and he becomes harder to avoid.

Video options are pretty basic, but they do get the game to run smoothly on lower-end systems.

This game's origin as a conceptual demo speaks to the limitations of its gameplay, but viewed as a simple, creepy game of hide-and-seek, there's a charm here that can hold interest for a short while, or entertain younger gamers for whom scares are fun but gunfire and gore are inappropriate. Visuals are adequate to the task if a bit repetitive, and scale well enough to run on midrange laptops with reasonable fidelity and speed.

There's fun to be had here, but the project seems to miss the point of the Slenderman phenomenon on a fundamental level. Rather than push into new or more varied forms of interactive storytelling, Slender: The Eight Pages shows us a very conservative take on what could have been cutting-edge horror fiction. Since it's free, it's worth checking out for the things it gets right, and Slender fans will be interested for historic purposes, as this title has spawned a sequel and at least one notable competing project.

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Review: Slender: The Arrival expands on the original, but it's still not enough

Slender: The Arrival is the long-promised, full-sized commercial follow-up to the popular Slender: The Eight Pages free minigame. While the original was a hit with Slenderman fans, it was just a proof-of-concept piece with acknowledged gaps in mechanics, locations, and narrative. Blue Isle Studios has addressed all of these shortcomings in the sequel, but fundamental problems in both design and execution remain.

Environments are more immersive in Blue Isle's second Slender game, but the hardware hit is high.

Since Slenderman's debut as a creepy supernatural stalker in a series of photoshopped fakelore pictures, the noodle-armed menace has become the horror mascot of the hipster age. Slender appears in countless YouTube videos, social media feeds, and blog stories, snatching postmodernist hearts.

The mythos is realized here as a first-person, stealth survival game with adventure story elements juxtaposed as cutscenes and clue items uncovered along the way. The core "run around with a flashlight" mechanic from Slender: The Eight Pages remains, but enjoys substantial improvements. The controls still consist of WASD and mouse, but default movement rates feel faster this time around. Environments are more varied and rendered in considerably higher detail. In addition to wandering the dark woods, we are treated to ransacked houses, abandoned mines, creepy shacks and flaming forests. There's even a remake of the original game hidden as an Easter egg in the first level.

Reduce Shadow Quality, Motion Blur, and SSAO for higher frame rates on modest hardware.

The story is considerably more detailed in Slender: The Arrival, with a defined narrative and characters to help elevate the suspense and surprises beyond jump scares and foot-chases. Blue Isle has overhauled the opponents as well. In addition to more evolved AI for Slenderman, other threats are woven into the story, and defensive tactics with the flashlight mix up the challenge for players when things get dicey. It's nice to have something to do other than run away. Tasks revamps show less innovation however, with page collection reskinned as switch-flipping or canister retrieval.

This illustrates the fundamental problem with The Arrival: a pathological refusal to take risks with an already conservative design. Slenderman's stories have rejected standard narrative forms since his first blurry image was posted, distorting reality and fiction to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere with minimal narrative elements and maximum emotional impact. Trying to capture that feeling with an off-the-rack selection of canned gaming elements makes Slender: The Arrival seem more like a cash-in than contribution. Like a lunchbox of your favorite movie villain, it's kind of cool but seems to miss the point.

The fuzzy, blank face of doom means death…or…something.

At $10, this is a hard sell. These Unity engine-based environments are more impressive than the originals, but exact a steep hardware price for their modest fidelity. Laptop play proved difficult on an AMD A10-based system, where mid- and low-range settings produced choppy framerates in the high teens. Mobile users will need beefy discrete graphics cards to get smooth gameplay. Desktop systems fared better, but you'll need a gaming rig to enjoy the experience properly. Office computers won't cut it.

Charlie and the piano in the main house are the keys to the first level's Easter egg.

This leaves Slender: The Arrival in a lonely place. It's better than the original, but it lacks that title's simplicity and focus, not to mention its free price. The extras help liven up the action, but not so much that the game is transformed into a new experience. Slender fans will enjoy what is certainly the most polished game devoted to the mythos to date, but the fact remains that when it comes to gaming, Slenderman's true potential remains lurking in the shadows.

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