Culture

Slender has you hunting down pages scrawled in the dark, some pinned to trees in a forest made of lots of other trees, while being stalked by an unseen threat. Themes are beginning to emerge in these horror games. In this case the monster is the Slenderman, a sort of modern mythical creature forged within the short life of the Internet on message boards and scary-story wikis.

Slenderman has a suit, tentacles, and no face. And unlike the enemies in Hide, he has no qualms about appearing to you with absolutely no warning. The environment is cleverly designed so that the monster can appear around any corner, behind any tree, or simply pop into existence out of the blackness. He doesn’t chase you. He stands perfectly still and black tendrils spread circumferentially from his back.

The environments are dark, repetitive, and typical. Acres of woods are punctuated with empty bathrooms, sheds, and lots of identical pieces of industrial equipment.

The game, truthfully, is scarier when the monster isn’t around. Once you “work out” the game and the Slenderman’s ways of forcing you to look at him it becomes less intimidating. You fail the game as a witness, your sanity draining to, once again, a screen that looks like a VCR being fast-forwarded. If you don’t look, the Slenderman can’t hurt you. Good luck.