Slender: The Arrival Review

We have already seen the pervious version of the Horror Game Slender: the eight pages which was originally named ‘Slender’ released in june 2012 where the game is played from a first person perspective into the dense forest trying to find the eight pages in different corners all the while avoiding the slender man. The game made it’s mark as it’s title sounds, and did a pretty good job in terrifying the gamers, as they have to run from someone they cannot kill or avoid.

Now we have the sequel to this previous version Slender: The arrival to PC, and a world wide release for all consoles on september 24th 2014.

This sequel however did not succeed in pleasing its gamers as well as the first version due to the heavy mechanics and difficulty spike compared to the original game.

The game begins in broad daylight, which confused me at first but gave a good vibe as to how the game would turn out. The first persons view is through the handy cam that he carries with him. It becomes pretty exciting when the day suddenly turns in to night as the player advances towards the house and also the writings gave me a lot of chills as the game progressed.

However the game itself is not bad at all. Firstly in the Arrival series you will be given only one Flashlight as a weapon, this increases the feeling of helplessness in the players and an immediate ‘flight or fight’ reaction takes place, in this case we may well choose the flight reaction.The slender man comes and goes every now and then, the simple mechanics of the game has been kept the same as the previous version and all we have to do now is run and only run.

The slender man’s behavior alters slightly every now and then in the game, at first he is seen through the window, then after going through the gate he can be seen on the top of the hill far away from the player. In the Arrival, the slender man can teleport to his victims as well, this is kind of unfair but well, it’s spooky so it’s fine. Later in the game we come across the main antagonist who is a girl who chases you and has the ability to suddenly appear in front of you and end the game, this was pretty frustrating as I died again and again in the game because of this and also having to play the same stage again and again made it very annoying. The only way to subdue the ghost of the girl is by pointing the flashlight at her.

The next feature that I found interesting is that when I tried to look at the slender man, the camera succumbs to electronic distortions like static, blurring audio distortion and color spots etc. The slender man in the previous series is shown faceless with white static background and the slender man in this series is shown with the overhead lit with color hue and with less amount of static.

The world that haunts the player in this Series of Slender moves from the dense forest to an Old Building, Mines and Sunbaked Hillside. The player initially goes inside the house to look for his sister. The game can really be enjoyed in a dark room with headphones as it gives you a more chilly feeling and a sense of being present within the game.

I also like the sound effects of this version than the previous one as you can hear the door creek and children whisper, the sound of the leaves and the footsteps are more prominent. ‘It really feels like you are in the game’.

Here is a reaction video for the game –

After having written all the good points about the game, there are a few glitches that I would like to add on to this feature in relevance to Slender: The Arrival. It is a short game, but it is a very repetitive game. Blue Isle has in fact done a pretty good job with the whole new spooky thing that goes around the house and the mine and the hill, but the unfair nature of the enemies and their sudden attacks that led me to a thousand Game Over’s was just too much!

The mine is the scariest Part of the game, where the spooky proxy kid (one of slender man’s minion) appears suddenly teleporting around you with a creepy knife and kills you a hundred times. This just made the charm of the game go hands down as I had to play it over and over again to even get myself across at some point.

The game could have achieved a high rate as Blue Isle managed to get all the effects and the surrounding of what they wanted to portray in the game to it’s layers right but just the little yet heavy and dull mechanics and also the spike in the difficulty level squandered the game’s charm.