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: DayZ turns frustrating military game into top-notch survival horror

I lasted just over three hours on my first day in the fictional Russian state of Chernarus. I'm told this is quite good, but just leaving the beach alive was victory enough for me. I pulled free of the bloodied arms grabbing at me, but it was dumb luck that found me sprinting frantically up a steep, dark wooded hill until I lost the gray-faced pursuers in the thickets and weeds. Exhausted, I lay down to hide but discovered I was wounded and bleeding. By the time I learned to use my single bandage, I was bleeding out.

A steep learning curve, but I had absorbed my first lesson: Stay out of sight. My second lesson occurred later that day, when I realized the sound of my rifle was a dinner bell. I died in the street with my legs broken, drowned in a mob of screaming madness. DayZ teaches by brutal example. Exposition is nonexistent, but once you learn something, you tend not to forget it.

Military simulator ARMA II's moddable, sandbox nature spawned unexpected offspring early this year when Dean Hall released his unassuming, open-world, zombie apocalypse mod for the game. 1.3 million users later, he's begun development of a standalone product destined to outsell ARMA II itself. DayZ is an honest gaming phenomenon.

You play from ARMA's familiar third-person cover-shooter perspective, a view you'll come to prefer over first-person for the situational awareness it provides in this game, especially under cover. The generally unpleasant, janky feeling of ARMA's engine is preserved, but works in DayZ's favor as imprecise aiming, motion delays, and other sloppy details only reinforce the survival horror mood the mod works overtime to present.

Get used to crawling in the weeds. You'll do it a lot if you want to stay alive in DayZ.

The goal is simple: Stay alive. You'll need to find water, food, shelter, and eventually weapons. Likely in that order. You can salvage preserved food, but hunting is also viable option. Blood transfusions restore lost health and cure ailments, but there's a catch–they require the assistance of another player to perform. In DayZ, fellow humans are potentially far more deadly adversaries than their undead counterparts. They lie, they cheat, they steal and they will kill you for a can of beans. Or, they just might save your life. Until you lower the gun and ask, you'll have no idea of knowing for sure.

Installation is a different kind of horror show. Both ARMA II and the standalone Operation Warhead are required for DayZ, and you need to complete a seven-step process that outlines the various installations, updates, launcher shells, and more before you can be eaten alive. Many things can go wrong along the way, and often do, judging by the pleas in forums dedicated to the game.

The code itself is famously unstable, described somewhat modestly as in an "alpha" state, but the biggest problems are gamers hacking the servers with bizarre, session-ending exploits. I experienced these frequently enough for it to be a legitimate concern, although the development team regularly takes measures to crack down on this behavior. Performance-wise, DayZ is no better than ARMA II, so plan to pack a firecracker of a system if you want smooth framerates and some visual pop. Laptops and milquetoast desktops won't stand a chance. Consider the system requirements a bit optimistic.

Staying alive is a simple goal, but not an easy one. Game over.

In this era of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, it's shocking that it took so long for a game of this nature to be made, especially given the success of other games with similar themes but radically different mechanics, like Valve's Left 4 Dead series. We have zombies on prime time, zombies fighting plants, zombie sex stories, zombies everywhere. Why it took one guy doing it for free to make this happen is a question for the gaming industry to ponder as they watch the number of players continue to grow.

For those on the fence deciding whether to try the mod or wait for the standalone version, I advise getting involved now. There's nothing more uncertain than unwritten software, and by the time Dean's team gets into gear, the moment may be over. DayZ is here, now, and it's free. There's no reason to wait. The hungry residents of Chernarus are dying to see you.

Note: The "Try it for free" button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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