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Review: The gaming is thin in free survival horror Slenderman: The Eight Pages |
August 09, 2013
Slenderman's hipster-Frankenstein genesis as a haunted-Polaroid Photoshop contest winner has spawned an unexpectedly popular homebrew horror cottage industry. Slenderman: The Eight Pages explores the self-styled urban legend as a short-form first-person survival game, and the result is a mildly diverting proof-of-concept piece that meets its meager goals, but fails to match the creativity and impact found elsewhere in the Slenderman mythos.
It's not a bad view, but get used to it, since there isn't much else to see.
For the uninitiated: Slenderman is a distorted, faceless, man in black who stalks people and makes them disappear. For a supernatural entity, Slender is pretty sloppy with his abductions, leaving behind a handy mountain of photo and video evidence for endless posts on places like YouTube.
Find eight of these, and you're home free.
Slenderman stories brush aside traditional narrative forms and are told via found footage, snapshots, message board threads, audio recordings and similar interlocking sources using a technique called Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). Imagine a crowd-sourced Blair Witch, served up as digital performance art, and you're on the right track.
It's odd then, to find this risk-taking attitude and creative spirit completely absent in Slender: The Eight Pages. Gameplay is pared down to 3D-engine-bound first-person survival basics, with WASD motion keys and controls for a flashlight and camera zoom. You've got two speeds for motion, slow and slower, the first accompanied by impaired lighting in a failed gambit to add tension.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045591/review-the-gaming-is-thin-in-free-survival-horror-slenderman-the-eight-pages.html#tk.rss_reviews
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