Welcome to our review of Slender: The arrival, a psychological thriller style game based upon the Slender Man moniker.
You’re on your own. No one to come for you. No one to help you. No one to hear you scream. Slender: The Arrival is the official video game adaptation of Slender Man, re-created from Mark Hadley’s original nerve-shattering sensation. Developed by Blue Isle Studios, The Arrival features a brand new storyline, improved visuals, great replay value, and most importantly, survival horror at its best.
Slender: The Arrival is a game that is all about exploration and the ideology of scaring the bejeezus out of you! Sadly it failed to do just that. I usually dislike the jump scare or psychological type of game, I prefer a happy feeling to my games so I went into this Slender: The Arrival game with more than just a weird kind of anticipation, would it truly scare me? Would it truly surprise me?
Sadly you are thrown into the game without any guidance or introduction, no, you just get a road in front of you. You head down the road, you are shown the developers and the team that worked on the game, a nice little touch. Followed by the first house you visit. You walk in, you explore the rooms and before you know it, you see that you have a flashlight to pick up and that scattered around the house are all sorts of informational notes.
The story appears to be all about your childhood and some sort of shared trauma. Like usual, I do not go into details storywise, spoilers are not my thing and never will be. After searching around the house, it is clear you need to go to the backside of the house for more investigating.
Running down the hill, you turn on generators along the way, lighting up the path and making it easier to see. Cross a little river on a shoddy bridge and there is the next house. It might have just been my game, but I had some weird visual discrepancy here and in some rooms, the floors appeared to be non-static. Suddenly I saw a weird human-like creature in one of the rooms, but yeah, I am this way, upon trying to shine my flashlight onto it, no movements or any type of action. I was a little disappointed in that.
Slender: The Arrival was mostly a walk in the park (pardon the pun, it will make sense if you play it too) for me. I did see the Slender Man rather early on in the game, but again, I felt like exploring so I went towards him and nothing really happened. Taking away the scare tactics of games like these, what are you left with? A rather stale experience that had me running around the place finding clues.
I finished the game in around 80 minutes and simply put, it is not appealing enough to entice me to play it once more. I never really had the idea of being scared. I did feel that I could be the exception to the rule as my job as a reviewer often makes me look very differently at games. I tend to insist on purposely dying in games or see how I annoyed I would get with certain aspects of a game, to truly grasp the feeling of an experience. I spent like 10+ hours in the recent One Piece game just fighting the enemies, just because I wanted to see if the added surplus of power accumulated through it, would really push my character to the top.
I can go crazy at times but sadly Slender: The Arrival failed to impress me much. Sometimes plagued by screens that moved, on purpose or not, I do not know. Sometimes plagued by the lack of excitement and just that eerie scream at the beginning caught me by surprise. Sadly that is not enough for a game of this genre. I would not call this game mediocre, but I did not call it great either.
In conclusion, Slender: The Arrival is a short game and it might disappoint during gameplay. It is not the best of games I ever played and should have been longed to really vouch for its price point. A passing grade but barely…
