It’s been some time since a game set out to do nothing less than scare the living daylights out of you; it’s a genre that recently appeared to be dying on the vine. To answer this dearth of games Slender: The Arrival is available from Steam.

You play a lone female, although you’re not aware of this for the first ten minutes, who finds herself, having crashed her car, drawn to a nearby house. As you approach the house night falls and strange noises can be heard in the surrounding wood. The house provides you with a torch and clues that all is not right, although what has happened will take you into the woods for answers.

Here your vision is restricted to the area illuminated by your torch, which shows little, but suggests much more. So, what’s not to like, a trip through a wood, barely able to see, all the time knowing that Slim is out there.

A gun would have been nice, but the game plays on the fact that, given you only has a torch against a supernatural threat, you are about as vulnerable as you can get. Wander too far and Slim will come for you, making the screen distort, while you blindly try to run away to save your life.

The game incorporates ideas from it predecessor and new purveyor of urban myth, The Eight Pages, by offering up the chance to run through a dark forest trying to collect eight different pieces of information.

As the game progresses you discover that you are Lauren and far from turning up by accident at the house, you have come to visit your friend, Kate, whose mother has recently passed away. So why are the plants dead, the house is open and where is Kate? Across the game's five chapters you try to answer these questions. The woods play a large part in the game, but you also get to explore both the house and a mine.

Chasing you all the time is the Slender Man, difficult to find, more difficult to avoid. The screen distortion which accompanies his arrival gets continually extreme the more time you spend close to him, making it next to impossible to get a good look. This plays on the old adage that the player’s imagination is likely to provide something more horrific than that which can actually be show.

Both the audio track and ambient sound go a long way to making the game enjoyable, There are some issues with the PC control, some doors, especially are over complex in their operation, but it’s a minor quibble.

Overall it’s a good, if short game; you should be able to complete it in a couple of hours, depending on whether or not you go for all the game's collectibles. It’s worth a punt at the right price.

7

Charles Packer