ALWAYS WATCHES NO EYES
Slender (Slender: The Eight Pages as of version 9.7) is an independent, Unity-engine-based horror game, developed by Agent Parsec and released in 2012. The trailer can be watched here
and a download link can be found here. The point of Slender is to scare you, but not through the usual methods. Instead of throwing tons of blood and gore at you, it puts you in the role of a helpless Slender Man Mythos protagonist desperately fleeing from the creature stalking your every footstep. You are armed with only a flashlight. It's pitch dark outside, you’re trapped in a fenced-in portion of the woods, and you’re searching for pages that look like they came right out of Alex Kralie’s notebook.
It gets worse. The pages you have to collect are randomly scattered through the huge area spanning the woods and each time you get another page, Slendy closes in on you a little more. He can strike at any time, your only warning being the sound of static. When the screen begins to tear up, the image grows snowy, and the sound becomes distorted, "it" is very near. Then you see it. Just standing there in the dark woods illuminated solely by your little flashlight’s glow. You want to look away. In fact, you have to look away, or else he’ll take you. So just run. Any direction will do. Switch off your precious guiding light, and book it. Run, run all you can until your lungs give up and you collapse. You're sure it hasn’t kept right up with you and isn't about to snatch you up. Right?
The game is very much inspired by Marble Hornets, the web video series that popularized The Slender Man Mythos, flawlessly recreating its most terrifying moments as you scamper through the forest looking for pages and praying to whatever deity you subscribe to that the game doesn’t generate the beast at an inopportune moment when you can’t readily escape. At this time, the game is just a beta, a proof of concept. The pages are randomly distributed in every new game, but there are certain places within the woods where they frequently spawn. The author is currently working on the ‘’real’’ thing and this little practice in terror is just the opening act.
He certainly wasn't kidding. On December 23rd 2012, a teaser trailer was released for the commercial expansion Slender: The Arrival. The game, a sequel to the original, was released on March 26st 2013 exactly at midnight. The Marble Hornets crew wrote the story for the game. You take control of Lauren, a friend of Kate's (the protagonist of the original game), who visits the latter's house just after the Slender Man attacked. She traverses through Oakside Park, finding notes of Kate and her friend CR, all the while avoiding the Slender Man and his proxies, his victims turned into servants of his will.
Don't look... Or IT takes you
This game provides examples of:
- Abandoned Area: The woods show signs of human activity through some of the randomly placed objects, though their purpose is unclear.
- An abandoned building is one such place. It looks like a shower house, but there are no pipes, water nozzles, or even a pool or lake nearby, so who knows. Either way, try to make this the first place you collect a page from, since it's unlikely you will get cornered in there if you do.
- A handful of parked trucks.
- A tool shed with the door barred shut.
- Some giant gas tanks lined up.
- Some lined up trees with their upper halves sawed up to perfect height.
- A pile of stones that resemble Stonehenge.
- A great big concrete tunnel.
- A large, cylindrical silo (similar to the one featured in Marble Hornets) without any entrances, and more.
- The other version of the game take place in an abandoned area, a hospice note , a sanatorium, prison, a carnival...
- Ascended Meme: The 20 Dollars mode that references a meme stating that if you give the Slender Man 20 dollars while he's currently out and about and chasing you, he'll leave you alone immediately thereafter.
- Adaptation Distillation: Basically every freaky Slender Man encounter from Marble Hornets can be reenacted here.
- Always Night: To keep your range of vision limited and also you feeling appropriately sandwiched in.
- Apocalyptic Log: The notebook pages that intell a previous between the Slender Man and one of his other potential victims.
- Backing into Danger: This is a good way to crash into Slendy's shins if he wasn't in your field of vision already.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: This is exactly what the Slender Man himself is if we really have to tell you at this point....
- Being Watched: After about the first or second page anyway which is exactly when the Slender Man starts chasing you.
- Bittersweet Ending: In later versions of the game, if you got all eight pages, the Slender Man would still find the Player Character, but she would wake up in the forest the following morning, so it's ambiguous as to whether or not she's really in the clear, though. Slender: The Arrival makes it clear that the protagonist did make it out of the forest alive, but only because Slender Man let her. He had other plans for her.
- The Blank: See Badass in a Nice Suit above for further information.
- Cheat Code: Two of them in fact:
- Daylight mode: Slender Man chases you during the day. Once you collect all 8 pages, you wake up at night, and you get this by completing the normal mode.
- 20 Dollars mode: Plays the song "Gimme 20 Dollars" whenever you get close to Slender, and you get this when you complete Daylight Mode, but sadly, though, this mode has been removed from recent releases due to copyright issues.
- Claustrophobia: The bathhouse as the halls are very narrow and the roof not particularly high, and one particular hallway seems to absorb whatever light you beam on it, so the entire experience leaves you feeling like there could be anything waiting around the corner, and in fact, there actually oftentimes is.
- Combat Tentacles: Have been added to Slendy since the initial release where he more specifically deploys four of these at once whenever you look at him.
- Creepypasta: The game originated from the Creepypasta story that was originally posted onto the internet by Eric Knudson aka Victor Surge back on June 10, 2009.
- Difficulty Levels: The production blog says the randomness and frequency of the Big Bad's teleportations is based on these, with a max level of 7. The difficulty goes up with each page you collect or for every four minutes that you go without getting a new page, and Slendy gets less random and more frequent the higher that it goes, and this can seriously trip up new players who take too long to find the pages because they don't know their way around just yet, and it's entirely possible that Slender Man can get to the difficulty level where he can turn you around and make you look at him if he gets too close behind you after pages one and two if you take too long because of this.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Zigzagged depending on your strategy where more specifically for players who prefer to keep the Slender Man out of sight and run away from him whenever he gets too close, it's played straight, but for players who prefer to lock him in place by facing him while using the trees to block their line of sight, this trope is inverted.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: Your camera will go crackly and fuzzy whenever Slendy's getting close.
- Failure Is the Only Option: Collect pages? Slendy gets you. Do nothing? Slendy gets you. Find all pages? Slendy gets you, but you wake up the next morning realizing that you're now officially forever trapped within the woods of the game-world and likewise doomed to run for the whole rest of your life away from the Slender Man.
- Featureless Protagonist: You learn nothing about who it is that you're playing as.
- Foreboding Architecture: Pretty much everything in this game that isn't a tree or Slendy is this, and even then, those sawed-off trees mentioned above are pretty unnerving to say the very least.
- Foreshadowing: The first page you find will warn of Slendy's coming, and by the second or third page, you'll probably already have had seen him for the first time.
- Hell Is That Noise:
- The ominous drumming sound heard upon collecting page one.
- The Ominous Pipe Organ heard upon collecting page three.
- The loud wind heard upon collecting page five.
- The mysterious and unnerving beeping sound heard upon collecting page seven.
- Hope Spot: Get all eight pages, and the ominous music stops. Congratulations, you beat the game and survived a close encounter with the Slender Man! Except that a few seconds later, he appears right before you once more, and this time around, there's absolutely no escape whatsoever, and even as you wake up the next day seemingly alright, just the very fact that you're still trapped within the woods afterwards easily makes for a rather horrifying Double Subversion of this trope.
- Infinite Flashlight/Ten-Second Flashlight: This game actually horrifyingly subverts both of these tropes at once in that the flashlight should easily last you long enough for an entire playthrough assuming both that you don't ever backtrack to any one single location that you've already visited earlier on within said playthrough and that you turn the flashlight off whenever its usage isn't absolutely necessary at a given moment in time, but it's by no means unlimited since the general gameplay mechanics make it to where its battery life lasts for exactly 15 minutes more specifically.
- Invincible Boogeymen: The Slender Man pursues you for the entire game, and you can't fight back against him directly due to the total absence of any man-made weapons from the general gameplay mechanics, hinder him except by backing away from him with anything that's opaque currently placed in between you and him and also turning off the flashlight to reduce the on-screen static build-up rate by 50%, or even look at him or else he'll kill you within a rather short period of time, and so your one other defense's to run from him while collecting the 8 pages scattered throughout the game-map with each page collected making him more aggressive, but the real kicker's that even when you complete the sole objective of the game, Slender Man still catches you anyway shortly afterwards.
- Jump Scare: Yep. Literally every single time that Slendy pops out of freaking nowhere, and in the newer versions, if you get 5 or more, Slendy can teleport right in front of you, but fortunately, though, he only ever does so very rarely, so you needn't worry too much about that happening until you're close to completing your one and only page-collecting objective.
- Lean and Mean: The Slender Man is an easy example of this trope in that he's both ungodly thin and also horrifyingly mean on top of that.
- Lost Woods: The game in its entirety is set within one single location at night with literally nothing more than a camera, a flashlight, and of course, the Slender Man.
- Luck-Based Mission: The pages' locations are all generated randomly and you won't know where they are until you stumble upon them. Meanwhile, the Slender Man's movements are unpredictable, and sometimes he'll come in so close outside your cone of vision that you won't realize that he's there until it's already too late to do anything about it at all!
- On top of that, though, the closest things that this game has to any skill-based elements would easily be both one's ability to plan out a good route before ever even starting up their horrifying journey at all and also one's ability to react to Slender Man's unpredictable movements.
- Madness Mantra: A few of these appear on some of the cryptic pages that you find, and they include messages such as "ALWAYS WATCHES, NO EYES" and "DON'T LOOK, OR IT TAKES YOU" just to name a couple of specific examples of such.
- Meaningful Background Event: At the very least up until he starts getting right up in your face.
- Minimalism: So, so much. There's not much to this game aside from some simple pants-wetting terror.
- Monster Delay: The game plays with this trope depending on exactly how you ever so choose to play it:
- If you do literally nothing aside from just sitting around with the game running nonstop, then this trope'll be somewhat exaggerated in that Slendy won't spawn up for five solid minutes from you not ever collecting any pages at all.
- If you instead immediately go and start collecting the eight pages ASAP, then this trope'll instead be considerably downplayed in that Slendy'll gladly spawn up a whole lot earlier and likewise also even potentially appear on the screen for the first time earlier on than he otherwise would obviously.
- No Plot? No Problem!: You do not start off as an ordinary person who becomes haunted by the Slender Man or gradually uncovers secrets surrounding the haunting. Instead, all that you're given is some dark woods and the instructions to "Find the 8 pages".
- Nothing Is Scarier: The Game. Most of the gameplay will be spent simply waiting for the moment that you need to panic, and much like other entries in the mythos, you never actually see Slendy doing much. Instead, he's just standing there and also very menacingly so in fact.
- Now, Where Was I Going Again?: You have absolutely no clues concerning exactly where the pages'll eventually turn up, and so your only option's to wander around aimlessly trying to avoid Slendy until you get all eight pages.
- One-Hit Kill: Can happen randomly if you're moving amongst the trees, so it's best to stick to the path, and if you go for too long without seeing Slendy, he teleports behind you and likewise instakills you.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: You get exactly one chance to get all 8 pages, and if and when you're caught, it's all over for you from there.
- "Psycho" Strings: The mysterious and unnerving beeping sound that you hear once you collect page seven is easily the closest thing that this game has to this trope, but in Slender: The Arrival, however, this trope appears in its full standard glorly whenever the "chaser" aka Kate comes and attacks you.
- Random Event: Both encounters with Slendy and the placing of the pages are these since the former always depends on whatever Slendy ever so chooses to do to you at a given moment in time and also since the latter always depends on what the general gameplay mechanics just so happen to do with them during a given playthrough.
- Read the Freaking Manual: The rules behind running are not anything like normal first person shooters, and the readme file has info, but sadly, though, hardly anyone ever so bothers to read it, so they likewise end up screwing themselves over.
- Right Behind You: While the Ominous Pipe Organ is groaning, Slendy'll teleport as needed to invoke this trope if and whenever he thinks that you're turning around to Look Behind You.
- Scare Chord: Blares whenever you-know-who comes within sight not far from you and sometimes when he actually doesn't.
- Schmuck Bait: It seems that collecting the pages themselves is exactly what draws him over to you in the first place.
- Hear an Ominous Pipe Organ? Then Look Behind You since Slendy'll gladly show up if he isn't there already.
- Scrapbook Story: If you pay attention, the pages actually do tell the story of a previous victim of Slendy's.
- Seeker Archetype: The Protagonist, though we have no idea who this person is or why they're out of the woods in the middle of the night.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In early versions of the game, if you managed to collect all eight pages, the Slender Man will get you and likewise still kill you off anyway!
- Shout-Out: The entire game is basically one big love letter to Marble Hornets. Doubly so with the unlockable Marble Hornets mode that makes the game look like it's yet another entry in the series and also removes all music.
- The ominous drumming sound that starts up once you collect your very first page sounds like giant footsteps.
- Silent Protagonist: The most that you'll ever hear out of the main character is exhausted panting once you've been jogging for five seconds or longer.
- Silliness Switch: 20 Dollars mode replaces the static that plays when Slender Man is close with this, but it's removed in version 0.9.7 due to copyright issues.
- Slow Walk: How you will be moving for the most of the game since your character seems to be unable to jog for more than a few seconds before running out of breath.
- Snowy Screen of Death: If you're caught by the Slender Man, things will go really fuzzy, and then fade to black.
- Stalker without a Crush: The Slender Man most likely since nothing is known about exactly what he ever so does to his victims, but not knowing that just makes him even more intimidating.
- Super-Persistent Predator: This is another thing that the Slender Man is all throughout the entire game, and this is especially true once you're on page seven since once you get to that point in the game, he's at his absolute fastest and also at his most unpredictable state imaginable.
- Who Forgot The Lights?: The game is absolutely pitch black without your flashlight or daytime mode, and that's especially true concerning the complex to be found within the center of the game-map, but you can still sorta navigate based upon the sky just so long as you can figure out exactly which way is which first off.
LEAVE ME ALONE
