Slender: The Arrival Reviews
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.
Slender: The Arrival exudes excellent atmosphere and genuine dread, but recycled and repetitive gameplay deeply hampers a potentially enjoyable horror experience.
The final nail in 'Slender: The Arrival's coffin is the simple fact that it's been uprezzed and cleaned up for the wrong gen, a generation where Hideo Kojima/Guillermo Del Toro's 'P.T.' has many of the same ideas, executed with maturity and expert dread, where progression isn't dependent on escaping the horror, but being forced to walk up and let it terrorize you face to face, and most importantly, it's an experience that's 100% free. 'Slender' offering something a similarly unique experience, but undoubtedly lesser, predicated on the success of successive, telegraphed jump scares and repetitive exploration can't hope to compete, and couldn't even if 'P.T.' wasn't in the picture. The result is a game that feels, pun unintended, thin on content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are scares here, but not much game. Ye have been warned.