You run blindly until you’ve got your courage back and then try to figure out where you came from. This is when your brain enters that primitive mode of desperation, screaming at you to abandon the page and just run run as fast and as far as you can into the woods before that THING catches up with you. But when you’ve got that heartbeat pounding in your ears and static creeping into the corners of the screen and then you have to stop to search an area for a tiny little page-well, it’s moments like this which really make Slender a special experience. The pages are easy to recognize, once you’ve spotted them. The maze is also defined by the limited aura of your flashlight, which always seems to illuminate just enough for you to see a glimpse of your pursuer out of the corner of your eye, or just enough of a tree branch to look like something reaching out to grab you. The maze is created by your panic as you quickly keep turning away from anywhere with even a hint of static, unwittingly boxing yourself into a corner. The game shouldn’t feel claustrophobic, with its open outdoor setting, but it does. If you see static on your screen, you’d better change direction: that’s the first sign HE’s appeared somewhere in front of you, in the darkness. Once you collect that first page, you will be spending the next hour of your life running. There is nowhere HE won’t chase you, no save points, no ways to continue your game. It falls in the same vein as Amnesia in that you are being chased by something you can only run from, but even Amnesia had safe zones. It is the most relentless survival horror game I have ever played. With each page you collect, HE will grow smarter and more feverish in his pursuit. Your only option is to avoid HIM and keep collecting the pages. It will get louder, it will get faster, and when it’s at its fastest you know that HE is near. Or maybe it’s a dank public washroom, the kind you’d expect to find at a poolside but not in the middle of, well, wherever you are. Maybe it’s a brick wall, placed obtusely in the middle of the path. So you stick to the path and eventually you come to something. Your flashlight creates bouncing shadows that make the branches seem like they are reaching out for you. You wake up in the woods in the darkest hours of the night with only a flashlight and the instructions “find eight pages.” You wander for a while down a dirt path-you could veer off into the thick trees, but the forest is more ominous than mysterious. Escaping from the Nemesis in Raccoon City pounding my way through rooms in the Himuro mansion while being pursued by the unstoppable Kirie desperately fleeing horrifying visions in Amnesia these define what I look for in a true horror experience. #CREEPYPASTA SLENDER THE EIGHT PAGES DOWNLOAD#Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor’s site, where you can download this software."When I think about my favorite fear moments in video games, the ones that come immediately to mind are those in which I’ve had no ability to fight. Since it’s free, it’s worth checking out for the things it gets right, and Slender fans will be interested for historic purposes, as this title has spawned a sequel and at least one notable competing project. Rather than push into new or more varied forms of interactive storytelling, Slender: The Eight Pages shows us a very conservative take on what could have been cutting-edge horror fiction. There’s fun to be had here, but the project seems to miss the point of the Slenderman phenomenon on a fundamental level. Visuals are adequate to the task if a bit repetitive, and scale well enough to run on midrange laptops with reasonable fidelity and speed. This game’s origin as a conceptual demo speaks to the limitations of its gameplay, but viewed as a simple, creepy game of hide-and-seek, there’s a charm here that can hold interest for a short while, or entertain younger gamers for whom scares are fun but gunfire and gore are inappropriate. Video options are pretty basic, but they do get the game to run smoothly on lower-end systems. This is presumably a horrible event, but since we don’t get to see anything past a fuzzy static fadeout, who knows? Audio cues and visual distortions alert you to his presence, allowing you a window to escape, but as you collect more pages this window narrows and he becomes harder to avoid. There are no weapons, no hit points, no inventory, no crouching to hide or any other forms of entertainment to interrupt the purity of the experience, which boils down to collecting eight pages nailed to things scattered throughout the dark woods before Slenderman catches up with you.
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