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Slender: The Eight Pages reviewGame: Slender: The Eight PagesPlatform: PC Genre: Unknown Developer: Parsec Productions |
Reader review by zippdementia
October 08, 2012
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. Your flashlight creates bouncing shadows that make the branches seem like they are reaching out for you. So you stick to the path and eventually you come to something. Maybe it’s a brick wall, placed obtusely in the middle of the path. 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.
On the wall is a page. You take it. And that’s when the heartbeat starts. It won’t stop for the rest of the game. It will get louder, it will get faster, and when it’s at its fastest you know that HE is near. Your only option is to avoid HIM and keep collecting the pages. With each page you collect, HE will grow smarter and more feverish in his pursuit. HIS only goal is to catch you. You cannot hurt him. You cannot slow him down. He moves quicker in the dark.
And your flashlight is beginning to dim.
Slender is relentless. It is the most relentless survival horror game I have ever played. 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. There is no safety in Slender. There is nowhere HE won’t chase you, no save points, no ways to continue your game. Once you collect that first page, you will be spending the next hour of your life running. 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.
The game shouldn’t feel claustrophobic, with its open outdoor setting, but it does. You feel like a rat in a maze. 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 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 pages are easy to recognize, once you’ve spotted them. 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. 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. This feeling never lets up. You run blindly until you’ve got your courage back and then try to figure out where you came from.
This simplicity can be frustrating. After all, not being able to save and quit the game means you have to commit whenever you want to tackle Slender and it’s one of the main reasons I haven’t finished the game (the other ten or twenty reasons involve not having enough clean underwear). It is also this same simplicity which makes Slender an incredibly satisfying horror experience. It gets at the root of the genre, where the fear comes from being placed in a situation for which your only answer is to run.
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. 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.
Those moments are all Slender is. It’s a simple first person game of “keep away” made terrifying by an intelligent use of graphics and sound. It might not be so scary if there wasn’t that constant pounding heartbeat broken only by the jarring cacophony when HE appears right in front of you. It should be easy to remember this is a video game and to snap yourself out of it, but the lack of actual visibility partners up with a very clear static effect as a constant clue to your pursuer’s proximity. It creates a jarring confusion of signals. It shrieks directly at the animal part of our brain, telling us that if we stop moving, even for a moment, we’ll be caught by something horrible. And then, once it’s got us moving, it makes sure that THING jumps out from the next corner.
It’s a little too unnerving to be fun for me. But it’s a wonderful study of fear that you can get for free for either Mac or PC from this website. And it continues to get updated fairly often, with new ways to play after beating the game and (god help us) harder modes. It's hard to turn away from the house of horrors when the price of admission is free.
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