Slender: The Arrival Reviews
Slender delivers plenty of solid jump-scares spread across the story mode, but there's far too much repetitive gameplay in between the actual action to make it worth the experience.
With the move to current-gen consoles and a few new levels, horror hit Slender continues to offer up scares, but at the cost of its own mystique.
Slender: The Arrival boasts some genuinely scary moments, but offers little beyond them. Chapters serve as a mini party game with friends, making this point-and-click game more of a horror movie than an actual interactive scare fest. The lack of a real story dampers things further, and if by some weird chance that players suffer the Slenderman hunt a second time, the feeling of that genuine fright will be long gone.
When you're not getting annoyed at being unable to find the final item in a given area, Slender: The Arrival is an excellent horror game that will leave your pulse racing. It's terrifying to be chased by these relentless enemies - frightening to see them no matter where you turn as you lose yourself deeper and deeper in the game's maze-like environments. It's just a shame that it can get so unbearably annoying to have to find a single scrap of paper hidden in a forest while enemies seem to guard its location over aggressively. If you can tolerate these moments, however, you'll experience a truly frightening game that will leave your guts in knots as you try, and fail (and fail, and fail), to stay alive.
Slender: The Arrival is far from the greatest horror game on Nintendo Switch. With the likes of Outlast 2, Layers of Fear, and Resident Evil to compete against, this bland and bare horror title shows its true colours separated from the hype of 2013. Unlike the mystical powers of the Slenderman, there's nothing compelling here in the slightest, unless you like looking at poorly rendered forestry.
Slender: The Arrival has solid qualities, as well as some hit or miss tendencies, leaning towards the miss side.
Slender: The Arrival is neither a bad or exceedingly good title. If you've played the last-gen version, you'll be getting the same thing here. If you're a newcomer, you'll be getting a fun but quick-to-finish game. The graphics haven't improved all that much and even the same glitch remains, but nonetheless it is still a title that provides entertainment. The soundtrack can be top-notch in places and the run of adrenaline can spur you on to keep playing when you see Slender Man for the first time. At its reasonably cheap price of £7.99/$9.99, the game isn't on the highly recommended list. Slender may be starting to lose his frightening charm, but he still manages to keep us on our toes, even if it is just for a short while.
Short of the performance and presentation improvements, this is the same survival horror game that you've probably already played. It functions fine now, and is perfectly adequate if you're in the market for a cheap and cheerful blast of terror – but don't expect much more. Small in both scope and budget, Slender: The Arrival is little more than a rest stop on the way to something bigger and better.
Slender: The Arrival is more frustrating than scary. The atmospheric locations are wasted in this boring survival-horror game where players do little more than search around for numbered items. The game goes a long way to flesh out the story and mythology, but it never makes a convincing argument for why Slender deserves to be a franchise.
Had more emphasis gone into the game's design (and, more importantly, length), Slender: The Arrival could've been one of the better horror experiences on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Instead, it's just a forgettable retread of a better PC game – and one you can easily pass over for a bigger, better game.
All in all, I had a decent time with Slender: The Arrival. It won't go down as one of my favorite horror games, but the experience was a fun one while it lasted. It's a bit short and there's not a ton of replay value, but Slender: The Arrival offers enough scares and at a budget price, is a no brainer for horror fans.
Slender: The Arrival exudes excellent atmosphere and genuine dread, but recycled and repetitive gameplay deeply hampers a potentially enjoyable horror experience.
The game isn't lengthy and will take most players only a couple of hours to complete. Regardless, Slender: The Arrival carries some truly notable frights. It's a powerful horror experience that will leave you feeling anxious.
Are you looking for something to chill your bones? Something to make the shadows seem that much longer and the night that much darker?
Slender: The Arrival lands on the Nintendo Switch six years after its original release and while the game's visual environment looks visibly dated, its sound atmosphere remains exquisite and transmits a feeling of restlessness. Where Slender: The Arrival falls below par is when it comes to its rather generic plot and a feeling of repetitiveness, aggravated by a short lifespan.
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Slender: The Arrival pulls this nonsense time again, it wants to give new life to the fiction but it can't resist showing off the goods. It delivers a variety of levels and even a new enemy, but there's no subtlety, no faith in Hitchcock's old adage: 'There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.' Some say Slender: The Arrival is just regurgitating what The Eight Pages had. This is partly true, but it's also forgotten that in horror, less is more.
While Blue Isle Studios' continued dedication to the source material is commendable, it can only go so far with fundamentals that are more emaciated than the titular horror mascot.
Overall, Slender: The Arrival was pretty well done. It has issues. Make no mistake. There were a lot of glitches (unintentional ones), a lot of scaling and framerate issues, as well as limited controls, vast amounts of dead space, and a story that could still be fleshed out more before being a contender. It needs a graphics update and some good voice actors as well. Again, this game is ten bucks and two hours long, so I wasn't really expecting a massive surprise of awesomeness. But even my innate fear of the Slender Man mythos wasn't enough to keep me invested enough in this game to want or even try a second playthrough. I am a huge fan of psychological thrillers. But for what this game has in its psychological scare tactics, it totally lacks in the things that make a game one that you'd want to come back to and play again and again. So as the title implies, this game truly is thick on scares but slender on everything else.
There are scares here, but not much game. Ye have been warned.
Slender: The Arrival did manage to perform well on the switch and of course give me some truly great scares but let's be honest. The Repetitive mechanics do start to take away from the scares and morph into frustration. The concept was great and I am impressed with how far the developers went but I think a different direction would have turned the tables.