Slender Man makes gaming debut

Internet meme and creepypasta regular Slender Man, has become the antagonist of a new game simply titled Slender.

Currently in development by Parsec Productions, the game involves the player making their way through a forest at night, discovering several outbuildings and vehicles, often which have a post-it note attached too them. The messages found on them vary from written warnings to hand drawn pictures, but all of them relate to the tall, white faced Slender Man, who appears to be pursuing the player.

As these pieces are collected, the music and sound effects change from being relatively peaceful, to increasingly menacing, amping up to a cacophony of noise as the final notes are discovered. The Slender Man also gets progressively closer. In the early parts of the game, he appears at most in the distance, but as the game draws to its close, players will often find him standing right behind them.

Completing Slender at the moment shouldn't be too difficult, as the only real obstacles are the player's fear and the Slender Man himself. In a similar fashion to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, looking directly at the creature is hazardous – doing so for too long kills you.

Several let's play videos have begun appearing, showing that this game is indeed pretty effective – the screams tell you that. The fact that you can't do anything when Slender Man appears but run and hide – usually by switching off your torch – makes for a pretty nerve racking experience. As with other games of this type though, the hard part isn't the hiding, it's knowing that the enemy is out there and that at some point you'll come in contact with it. The waiting is terrifying in itself.

It's not clear from gameplay footage whether the Slender Man legitimately follows the player around, or if it appears nearer and nearer when it is looked at. The fact that doing so for too long kills you, makes that quite a hard theory to test however.

For now in its somewhat early stages of development, Slender is already proving to be very effective. With a few tweaks and improvements, it could be a great game.

Kitguru says: If you want to give it a try, the main site is down for now due to traffic, but the download is being mirrored over at Reddit.

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