Slender: The Arrival - Game Review

I’m the perfect age to remember peak Slenderman hype. When the creepypasta first started getting big I was about 10 years old – the time when your mind first starts being truly susceptible to the darker side of imagination. Hushed whispers at sleepovers, telling stories about The Slenderman that we’d made up on the spot to scare each other, nightmares about a blank-faced predator, I was there for all of it. I remember scouring YouTube for “Top 10 Creepypastas” videos on the family computer, skimming through to find where Slenderman would rank, and listening only to that segment, gleaning whatever information I could. Everything else in that scene was goofy, stupid, but this, this was something special. In a way, when I booted up Slender: The Arrival, I think I was hoping it would rekindle some of that initial spark, or at least remind me why this character and mythos held such an appeal for myself and so many others. Instead, what I got was an experience so shoddy, so lazily constructed, that not only have I wasted my time, but I’ve tarnished those memories irrevocably.

Slender: The Arrival is not a scary video game. That’s not a requirement for horror, mind you, some of my all-time favorites in the genre never actively “scare” me. The problem is that this game thinks it’s scary. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game that thinks so highly of its own execution, and that so confidently runs itself into a brick wall repeatedly. While moments and ideas here inspire some hope, they just leave me wishing for a completely different game to come sweep me away and rescue me from the tedium of this one. One excellent example of this is the first “main” level: The Eight Pages. An retooling of the first game’s single idea, there’s a lot of potential here for a fun level, and with the randomizing forest locations every time, I thought this would lead to some really tense exploration a-la Blair Witch. The problem is, you very quickly remember that Slenderman is not scary. In fact, after about 5 minutes playing this game, I started to question how we ever managed to find this guy scary to begin with. He’s hardly imposing, standing barely a foot taller than our protagonist, and when you have 7/8 of the required pages to move on, it becomes nothing but infuriating to have him continuously stand in the only paths you haven’t tried. The random generation very quickly turns into a curse, as I found myself repeatedly killing myself intentionally in hopes of getting the pages to spawn in a layout that didn’t take me 20+ minutes to navigate. The next level, Into the Abyss, is a lot more tolerable, and adds another twist that certainly makes the mechanics more interesting, but once again I found myself more frustrated than anything with the way this game loves to use its randomization. It becomes all the more glaring once moved into an indoor environment, and by the end of it I was glad to be done with these segments. From here the game takes a much more linear roller-coaster approach to its story, and while I think the game is worse for it, by that point I was glad that I wasn’t going to have to keep repeating content. It’s here where the game’s writing and storytelling issues come into full light, however. All through the game you’re picking up (and maybe even reading!) notes left by characters whose names I couldn’t be bothered to learn. As supplementary lore, they were fine enough, but when I later realized this was the game’s excuse for a plot, the laughable grammar mistakes, and inhuman “dialogue” became far less excusable. Some of it is so bad that I could almost see it being a commentary on the amateurish nature of the creepypasta it came from, but it’s just too self-serious for me to give that theory much credibility, and the way the game’s “plot” relies on it is just too convoluted to be such a direct parody.

I did not enjoy my time playing Slender: The Arrival. I don’t think it’s completely worthless, and there are certainly ideas to be gleaned here and there, but at the end of the day there’s nothing here I would say is worth trudging through the garbage to seek for. I don’t miss the Slenderman craze and, thanks to this game, I’m kinda glad that he’s gone.