Slender: The Arrival Reviews

Slender: The Arrival is ranked in the 11th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
5 / 10
Jul 3, 2019

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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Mar 25, 2015

Slender: The Arrival exudes excellent atmosphere and genuine dread, but recycled and repetitive gameplay deeply hampers a potentially enjoyable horror experience.

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Mar 24, 2015

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.

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Lee Mehr
Top Critic
5 / 10.0
Nov 19, 2023

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.

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4.9 / 10.0
May 26, 2015

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.

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4.8 / 10.0
Oct 15, 2014

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.

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Twinfinite
Twinfinite Staff
Top Critic
2 / 5.0
Nov 26, 2013

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.

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4 / 10
Jun 21, 2019

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.

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4 / 10.0
Mar 30, 2015

Are you looking for something to chill your bones? Something to make the shadows seem that much longer and the night that much darker?

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