Scared of Slender

Don’t look!! Or it takes you….
Well, that’s certainly threatening.  Unless it wants to take me to Disneyland, in which case, how sweet! I’ve never been.

Read on, travelers, it’s one terribly frightened blogger’s journey into the exciting, sweaty-palmed world of the indie-horror game, and internet sweetheart of late, Slender. I’ll stuff anything that’s a real spoiler in a paragraph at the end, so just read until the last paragraph if you haven’t played Slender yet. I link the developer’s page/the download page in the article, and it’s free!

Slender? Am I telling you to lose weight? Of course not (you’re very good looking), it’s a myth of dubious origins, most likely 4chan, of a tall faceless man in a plain black suit said to stalk and kidnap children with it’s dark tentacles leaving no trace… standard creepy monster myth with sketchy black and white photo evidence.  A key element of the myth is that if you look directly at the Slender Man, he takes you. All this horror serves as very good Blair Witch style horror short fare, and as the lovely Parsec Productions (download here!) has proved to us, makes horrifying Amnesia-style gameplay.  In the interest of full disclosure, on the whole, I have no use for straight horror films, but adore horror games.  I take ’em as scary as they come as far as games are concerned, and Slender got some of my favorite aspects of a horror game dead right.

I’m going to tackle some nuts and bolts first.  Basic gameplay concerns an unseen protagonist who seems to climb into a fenced area of dark forest, apparently because they have a keening for death harder than the average stunt motorcyclist, and runs (did I say run? I mean painfully plods) around to collect eight creepy pages. Don’t look at the Slender Man, or he takes you. Cool. Very limited, story-wise, no characterization, but I can dig the rat in a cage effect they set up by limiting mobility and light.  You have a flashlight, but no weapons, running causes your beam to face the ground, and isn’t all that fast.  Very Amnesia.

Speaking of lighting, Slender runs on the Unity engine, which the delicious and upcoming Wasteland 2 too also utilizes, so it was nice to dip my toes into the engine, although I get the feeling the devs weren’t exactly forcing the engine to fire on all cylinders (badum-ching!).  It uses DirectX 9, and was slapped together with Assembly and C# I believe. Pretty snappy. I demand good lighting and perfect sound from my horror games, but I’ll only gripe about the lighting (at v0.9.5 it’s not even been fully released yet so take it with a grain of salt).  Treetops that had strange loading distances for the lighting and at times seemed bioluminescent, no thanks.  I’m fighting for my life down here, I don’t need these treetops freaking me out, please. The flashlight beam was okay, but there was little concern for reflectivity of light in the game, just your basic shine.  Flash back to limited characterization, if they had simply provided even one dirty mirror to murkily establish the protagonist and provide some ‘pop up in the mirror’ moments for Slender himself, I would’ve liked that.

As far as the environment/the atmosphere is concerned, it was very cleverly textured, in the way that they made a small area seem huge and treacherous through repeated textures, having the trees claustrophobically blend together, and used a limited color scheme of black, dark black, light black, and tree.  It made you hang on to the landmarks like cars, propane tank fields, or large rocks like lifelines, old friends who could whisk you away from it all…. (except for you, maze-bathroom-thing. I hate your guts).  However, the grass and trees do just jut out of the ground awkwardly, like a maniacal gardener chopped the root system off of everything in some other forest and placed it in this cozy pit of darkness. A possibly unintended gameplay element stemmed from the issue of contrast that these improperly lit entities, which forces you to differentiate from lighting oddities and the real danger, Slender. Trust me, though, you’ll figure it out when you play.  This is all due to, and my hat is off to, the kiss-of-perfection sound design. Minimal environmental sound forces you to focus on the quiet, perfect for a forest at night where everything but the odd cricket has been scared stiff by an unspeakable horror. As you pick up pages, eerie noises persist through the air… louder and louder… they grow in a mechanical chorus as you add pages… one… by one… and BAM!! Surprise music attack! Critical hit!! It’s super effective!! You have died of heart failure. Try the game and see what I mean (but please don’t actually die I love your faces)! Another interesting atmosphere note: you can look at the sky, which seems to offer some warmth from your dismal fate, but you’ll realize when you look up for comfort, you know Slender will still take you.  It’s like the game takes away all promise of salvation…. (God can’t help you now)

SPOILERS!!
So here’s where I talk about my personal experience and what I know about the mechanics of the game.  It doesn’t exactly tackle the big questions, the biggest it gets is ‘Why do I vehemently want to die in a dark fenced off forest?’ When you start off in the forest, the first play through, you have no idea what to expect, ostensibly, so you creep along and do what the intro screen said, try not to look anywhere while simultaneously looking for “pages.”  Pages turn out to be more improperly lit entities resembling printer or notebook paper, with unhelpful hints about how you’re totally going to die, you can’t run away, Slender Man has no face, waah. In your dying throes, couldn’t you have written something more helpful, like, “RUN YOU IDIOT and keep that damn flashlight up, a person’s gotta see in this stupid forest!” or, “Kick him in the groin, it’s his only weakness! (he is Slender Man)“? 8 pages are tacked around your caged-off section of forest, which in a brilliant stroke of Zelda forest logic you can’t just climb over and run so far away.  As you pick them up, Slender becomes increasingly dangerous. I understand it’s something like (#=# of pages you’ve picked up)
0 – Safe (but you’re on a timer for Slender to spawn and try to kill you)
1 – Still safe, but things are quickening
2 – Most agree (me too) this is when Slender spawns, but he watches from afar…
3 – Slender starts moving towards you.
4 – Slender is always close.
5 – He is always close behind you.
6 – He is always REALLY close behind you.
7 – You’re on a short timer, kid!
8 – No escape.
General rules being don’t dilly dally, never turn around, don’t stop walking, and only run when you’re good and ready. You get tired.  Bugginess and technical stuff, well, I haven’t gone through the trouble to dig into the code because I only ever glitched once (I got killed prematurely and Slender wasn’t near me), but that was just a good laugh.  Draw distance is no problem because everything’s cloaked in darkness, textures are basic but do their duty (although I’d urge them to rethink the normal mapping of several textures).  Many game elements are grounded in the buzzed about Unity resources, which seem to do at least this game justice. The Slender enemy model is a bit chunky but still horribly frightening situationally (I hear they’re improving it for the next release).

Okay, so I’m not much of a screamer, yeller, or laugher in response to fear. I get punchy and quiet (gotta keep those ears peeled, ya know). When I was Taken on my first playthrough (got 6/8, took me a darn long time to beat it afterward) I was deep in my horror game ritual, no lights, no people, noise cancelling headphones set to 10/100 with the bass boosted, so I was on the edge of my nerves with the background music at that point, and then he came… I felt fear to my core. My heart rate….. seriously, it was a problem. And it was AWESOME. Verdict: If you wanna be scared, come to Slendababy. I don’t care how much I complained about the lighting, I was more thoroughly frightened than in the creepiest moments of Dead Space 1. Play Slender!! Here’s the dowload link in case you didn’t get it the first time: click Game and then download appropriately.

PS – Seananners does terribly entertaining horror gameplays!