Horror Games Special Feature – Slender

Posted on 22nd October 201527th October 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

Horror is a niche genre, with most of the examples in this special feature going unnoticed by mass audiences.
There’s Resident Evil, there’s Silent Hill and em….there’s more. That’s the general reaction.
But one game that refused to go unnoticed, like a big dead elephant in the room, was Slender.

Released as a free-to-play online game in the summer of 2012, Slender immediately became an Internet phenomenon. Let’s Play videos went viral, and its reputation exploded. It was as much about seeing other people’s reaction to this terrifying experience as it was about actually playing it.

Like Amnesia, the brilliance of Slender is in demanding your gaze never settled on the monster. Spotting the eponymous Slender Man usually meant an instant death, unless you could put a substantial amount of distance between yourself and him very bloody quickly.
This brutal game of cat and mouse makes up almost the entirety of the gameplay, with a sparse collection quest giving you an incentive to explore.
This is survival horror in the simplest sense of the word.
Which only served to make it more raw.

What makes Slender worthy of mention is its endless replayability. In almost any horror game you can think of, regardless of how good it is, there is always a segment or two that grates on the nerves (and not in the enjoyable, thrill seeking way).
It might be that one odious water-sample puzzle, or it might be the hour long fetch quest to retrieve a key shaped like a pine cone. It might be that one obnoxious segment of the game where you have to kill 72 robot cockroaches with flamethrowers instead of eyes so that you can save the President’s daughter.

Slender doesn’t have that. This is very much a pick-up-and-play game that you can do again and again in a single sitting, without getting bored.
In that sense, it’s a lot like the dark and gritty remake of Pac-Man, where you wander through a dark maze, looking for collectibles and avoiding ghosts for points. Few, if any, survival horror games have this sort of accessibility, which might be what made it so popular.

It is worthy of note that the lengthier sequel (which also contained the original game) received less favourable reviews, possibly because it was divided into stages instead of the original pick up and play style.
The fact that it wasn’t free to play or online (making Let’s Play video harder to make) might also have been a factor in this.

Best Moment
Like a lot of the games in this special feature, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single great moment because it’s all so random and unscripted. It can generally be taken as a given though that any time Slender Man pops into your vision, it will be a memorable experience.

Where is the franchise now?
As mentioned, a sequel was developed for modern consoles and has enjoyed moderate success over the past year or two. It seems unlikely that another sequel will be developed (successfully), as the game’s key selling point is its simplicity.
But hey, they can always take the Pac-Man route even further and release a game featuring Slender Woman.