As much as I adore Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival, and consider their core mechanic a masterwork of horror, the fact that there’s relatively little to them other than that mechanic (or variations thereon) leaves something to be desired. The missing component of those games, featured in most other Slender mythos stories, is investigation: the protagonist’s attempts to understand who or what the Slenderman is, via research into his past victims (usually including a close friend or relative who served as the point of contact between the protagonist and the Slenderman).

What I’m picturing is a zone-based open-world game, probably with travel between zones handled by a diegetic GPS phone app interface. Each zone would be an environment littered with clues in the form of old documents, journals, URLs, video tapes or other recordings – look no further than Gone Homefor the perfect implementation of this concept. These would, apart from building the story, also cue the player as to where to look next, and what to look for, perhaps even gating the player to some extent: unlocking a new zone when you find the coordinates of a secluded forest hideout, or finding the combination to a safe that is locked in a different zone. Care should be taken, however, to ensure that there are always multiple leads for the player to follow, lest the mystery devolve into a linear breadcrumb trail.

Each zone would also carry some risk of being inhabited by the Slenderman, or a person he has driven mad, who harass the player while they conduct their searches. The probability would vary – some zones would be completely safe, others might feature mounting risk the longer the player lingers in them, or could shift from low to high risk when the player collects a critical item. It might be possible to escape a location and return another time when it is safer. In addition, the world in general would become increasingly unsafe as the game proceeds, until even the player’s safest “home base” areas are regularly under attack.

The last, crucial feature is the failure state. When the player is caught, rather than a plain Game Over, they ought to be knocked out, and wake up in a different place. They might wake up missing a piece of evidence they had collected, or with a new, strange item in their possession. They might wake up in an entirely new zone! Elsewhere in the world, clues might have been shifted around. Perhaps the player also has the opportunity to review a recording from a camcorder they were carrying, allowing them to find out what happened – and perhaps even forcing them to re-play the section they failed in order to find out. The goal, in any case, is for failure to mix things up and create new challenges, rather than simply end the game entirely or force the player to reload from an earlier save.