Today I decided that I would finish Swords and Serpents (SaS), but when I finally sat down I realized that the grind of SaS had exhausted me and I needed a palette cleanser. Plus I needed to kill some time until today's deals appear
in the Steam Summer Sale. On a whim I decided to turn to a recent free game I found called Slender.
At this point many of you (at lease those that follow Internet memes) know about the Slenderman. For those that don't, the Slenderman is a tall man dressed in a black suit, with little to no face, who stalks children. The origin is a bit strange, as it has surfaced by the folks at Something Awful, who may have gotten it from the excellent PC Adventure
Trilby's Notes created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who may have been inspired by an old German legend. Whew. So at some point an Indie gaming company Hadley/Parsec Productions decided to create a small title around the urban legend, which finally brings us to the free Indie game, Slender.
Slender is a FPS game out to scare you. It starts at night in the woods, with a flashlight illuminating a small section of trees. The mission is simple: Find eight pieces of paper spread out throughout the game, each of which seems to be a disturbingly hand-drawn picture related to the Slenderman. The game is open and free-roaming, and there is no visual arrow or blinking light to direct you to the next page. Nonetheless, with only a few seconds of looking I found a path leading to the first page, which is attached to the back of a very ugly tree. Following the path you come across the second page, which introduces you to both the Slenderman himself as well as the tension created by the developers of the game. By simply looking at the Slenderman (whom you will only see motionless, arms outstretched towards you) the screen starts to go fuzzy, which gets worse the closer you are to the Slenderman (this will happen), where to counter you just point your character in a different direction, hold in the run button and haul it out of there. Seeing him the first time put me on edge a bit, but the real scare happened later.
To be honest, I abstained from posting a video or pictures because I'm hoping that a few of you will download and play it. The game is an Indie-style FPS concerned exclusively with atmosphere, not action. It features quite a few options for the performance-conscious of us (options from "Fastest" to "Fabulous") so it should run on most computers made after 2007 (maybe earlier). The game is only about twenty minutes in length, though the first few attempts likely won't last more than five minutes.
Slender is very brief, pretty, and small in download size (about 55MB). For those that enjoy short and sharp gaming experiences and enjoy a good scare, I urge you to try the game.
EDIT: The game's website is back up, so you can now download it
from here.
Special thanks to Tomberry's
original article on
Knowyourmeme.com. Having just discovered the whole Slenderman thing myself this was an excellent resource.
