Slender: The Arrival

A no-frills port of an already underweight horror package. There's much other developers can learn from Slender's terror tactics, but we suspect they've got the message by now. Give the tall lad a...

Who would have thought that a simple game with outdated graphics involving a quest for 8 pages of paper while being tracked by a faceless monster using only a flashlight as your protection would turn out to be one of the scariest games of all time. In...

Slender Man, created as part of a website contest for a creative new urban legend, grabbed our imaginations in a terrifyingly primal way with a simple concept: a well dressed, strangely elongated boogeyman who takes our children from parks, never to be...

Slender: The Eight Pages was a free game experiment that took the internet by storm last year. Based on the internet-created “myth” of the Slender Man, it was a terrifying little game set in the woods at night where, armed only with a flashlight,...

This leaves Slender: The Arrival in a lonely place. It's better than the original, but it lacks that title's simplicity and focus, not to mention its free price. The extras help liven up the action, but not so much that the game is transformed into a new experience. Slender fans will enjoy what is certainly the most polished game devoted to the mythos to date...

It’s all about your first playthrough, and it’s just about cheap enough to justify that scare. Suspend your disbelief and flick off the lights and you’ll find a horror game that’s light on game, but tall on tension.

Minimal game mechanics with no depth whatsoever, but a tense, well-made survival horror game just the...

But it masterfully uses these tricks to tap into honest truths: a fear of the dark that lurks somewhere in every person, the terror of being pursued and the horror of being caught.

Slender delivers some legitimate scares, but ultimately crumbles under its own weight.

Expanding on the ideas first presented in Slender: The Eight Pages, The Arrival adds story and even more scares, but fails to diversify gameplay.

To be fair, The Arrival, much like its predecessor Slender: The Eight Pages is initially very, very frightening. The game managed to terrify the bejeezus out of me during my initial playthrough because of the game’s effective minimalist design, which emphasized on creating an atmosphere of uneasiness and terror through sound effects and the antagonist’s unpredictable movements.

There are a handful of stand-out moments, though, and those who played and enjoyed Eight Pages will certainly find this expanded vision an improved and more complete experience. But if you aren’t willing to endure repetition and a few immersion-breaking flaws, you’d best save your fright for another night.