I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest fan or follower of the whole Slender Man phenomenon. I know of the property and all the controversary surrounding it like the 12-year-old girls who stabbed their friend in the woods so Slender Man would appear to them and prove he was real. My first time playing any Slender Man game was in fact this very title…only back in 2015 on the PS4. And now tall, dark, and skinny is coming to the PS5, entirely rebuilt using Unreal Engine 5.
Even with this next-gen boost in graphics fidelity, Slender: The Arrival offers nothing substantial and what few scares it does manage to stir up are cheap “screeching cat jumping out of the dumpster” moments that were even less scary the second time around. There isn’t much in the way of gameplay, and most of the time I felt I was playing Firewatch while being stalked by Agent 47. You start the game at dusk as you exit your car and being the walk down a short path to a new subdivision currently under construction. There is no setup and no real story other than what you find by picking up and reading various bits of text and listening to recordings. Your first and most important objective is to find the flashlight, because once the sun goes down no amount of gamma correction will peel back the darkness of this game.
One thing Slender does well is tease and lure you in the right direction using its own environments. While you are searching the house a distant scream nudges you into the backyard and through the gate toward a generator that turns on distance lights that lure you to a new generator, new homes in various stages of construction, and one that is even burned out. The entire game is played through the viewfinder of your camera which will periodically fizzle to indicate Slender Man is nearby. Ironically, in the early part of the game you will actually walk towards him (often a silhouette on a distant hilltop) to progress, but all too soon you will be running for your life screaming like a little girl.
Once you reach the second half of the game you will be tasked with finding eight pages scattered about the procedurally generated forest. Note the words “procedurally generated”, which means that each time you die and restart, the level and the note locations will be randomly populated, although after more than a dozen trips through the woods I only saw about three actual variations.
Collecting the first few notes seems relatively easy, and a subtle blue lens flare will always guide you to any nearby points of interest like a tower, supply shed, map kiosk, outhouse, rowboat, or even a bathhouse. But the more notes you collect the more aggressive Slender Man’s pursuit becomes. At first, he might be off in the distance, but by the time you are hunting down that last note he will be right in your face, forcing you to quickly turn and run and hope he doesn’t materialize right in front of you. If you pause for more than a second or two the camera is sure to fizzle, and your heartbeat will start thumping indicating you had better RUN!
I mostly knew what to expect going into this review, but I was not prepared for seeing just how good this game looks using the new Unreal engine. Wow! Talk about photo-realism in just about every scene in the game ranging from models to environments to textures. It’s so real it’s a bit disconcerting, like when exploring that first house early in the game, and it feels like taking one of those virtual home tours on Zillow. While not using the full array of UE5 tools, the game has been transformed into the best-looking version of itself since its creation more than a decade ago. You start off with the warm orange glow of a sunset but are quickly cast into pure darkness with only the cone of your flashlight and any environmental illumination to light the way. And to complement these next-gen visuals are some of the most terrifying ambient and environmental sounds used with great effect to elicit more than a few audible screams from me. The camera fizzle combined with the increasingly loud and quickening heartbeats will send shivers down your spine, but the new camera shake when Slender Man is nearby is annoying and needs to go away.
Slender: The Arrival is a fun diversion that is worth maybe $10. Despite the randomized levels there is little reason to revisit this 2-6 hour game, although you may get some twisted pleasure from watching your friends squirm while they play. Blue Isle Studios has done a magnificent job with this remaster when it comes to updated visuals, but they are going to have to add a whole lot more content and some actual gameplay that goes beyond me blindly running around the woods looking for notes while avoiding an anorexic Agent 47.
