After that is a pastoral walk around a mountain with a teddy bear who flashes you back to the abduction of the dumbest kid on Earth, and then an old tube TV you can play through other flashbacks on via the magic of VHS. This one actually runs after you but you can lose it by waving your flashlight in its face. Apparently that was enough to get me a pass on Easy mode, which took me to a mine where I had to activate 6 generators before a zombie in a hoodie ate me. The dude just teleports around and then stands there, and if you get too close or stare too long you go nuts.Ĭollecting pages and running from a scarecrow in a suit got so tedious I eventually gave up and embraced death with 6 of 8 pages collected. Every page you pick up makes the Slenderman come after you harder but he doesn’t move. Your start point, the landmarks, and the pages are randomly placed every time so exploring is both essential and infuriating because you can’t hardly see a godddamned thing and there’s no map. The second level sticks you in a pitch-black wilderness park with a flashlight and instructions to collect eight pages. I thought wrong, because Slenderman is about as threatening as a coat rack and escaping him is more a clerical matter than a horror one. But maybe once I was in some actual danger it’ll get scary, I thought. There’s literally nothing threatening in this first chapter and even for someone as jumpy as me, the dark woods and low soundtrack and poofing zombie failed to put me on edge. Along the way I found a burned-out house with a shy zombie inside, something unexpectedly benign and (as far as I know) entirely unrelated to the Slenderman. The place has been tossed and someone scribbled spooky things on the walls, so after unlocking some doors you wander off into the woods. The opening level has you wandering down a country road to a brand new house, seemingly the first of a new subdivision. There’s a guy and a lady and they found Slenderman and the guy ran off and the lady followed him and I’m following them, I think? Whatever the story is it’s a serious let-down in that nothing you do seems to affect it or even reveal much of it, leaving you to just escape certain death because you were stupid enough to wander into it in the first place. I’ve found maybe half the ones laid in my path so far and have only gleaned enough of the story to know that I don’t care about it. I usually open these things with a plot synopsis but Slender: The Arrival makes the unfortunate choice to provide absolutely NO narrative outside of its customary horror notes. I’m going to explain this disappointment in detail but that’s going to take spoilers, so if you really want to experience the yawns yourself, stop reading here and get to it. It turns out he really doesn’t, though, and after a good hour or so in his domain I feel more like a forgetful secretary or a handyman than a horror protagonist. And so it is with idle curiosity that I turn to his Arrival here, in the hopes that he makes a compelling and terrifying antagonist to escape from. I enjoyed the great white hype when he was a creepy photoshop insert but lost interest in his multimedia exploits. I’m not really a Slender guy, and no I’m not talking about my unfortunate dad bod.
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