Quick Look: Slender: The Arrival

Ryan was the perfect person to have on this.

This quicklook was great. Great job Ryan and Patrick. Now just let me say this before being banned for saying it: slender man the arrival endurance run with Ryan and Patrick. Just do it.

When I was younger, I watched Marble Hornets with a bunch of friends on a laptop in a dark ass room in the middle of the night. I had anxiety and paranoia issues for months after that. No shit. I had to cover my skylights in my room because I couldn't sleep. Weird how specific things (I had seen more traditionally "horrifying" things by that point, and I'm not talkin' about horror movies mind you) can just nail your psyche.

To be fair, I was already a bit fragile at the time. But still, man that messed me up for a while. I'd always had issues with seeing faces and shit in the dark but it never really freaked me out that much.

Now of course, Slender Man doesn't do anything to me. So this is just hilarious to watch Ryan and Patrick freak out.

I will say that I think they could do a better job of having slender show up more subtly. That first sighting especially kind of sucked. Slender Man's MO is to just be in the background, barely visible most of the time. This has him a little too visible in my opinion, which puts a lot less stress because you usually know if you see him or not. The thing that really got me freaked out was how many things in my neighborhood (which had no street lights at night) my brain could interpret as a tall slender man. And just the "noise" of your eyes in what is practically the pitch black. Even if I had actually seen slender man, I probably never would have been certain about it, and there were plenty of times my brain was convinced something COULD be slender man. It never conjured any real images of him, because I'm not crazy, but it certainly saw shapes in the darkness and the woods. This seems to go for a more direct approach, which I think is less interesting. It would be really cool to see someone put more work into a system that made Slenderman appear like he does in most of the places he shows up: in the background of pictures, barely visible, or among hundreds of trees, just barely lit by the moon. Not standing in the middle of a yard in front of a brick wall...

All these games that would be great for the Oculus Rift, all these fucking games!

The early Marble Hornets stuff was horrifying, despite it's obviously low budget (some of the early clips where you just see him hanging around in front of the house, looking really fake, but in a pretty unsettling way). Following it for too long ruined it for me though, for most I'd probably recommend dropping off around episode 20-30 or so, after that I felt it started getting a bit repetitive, with lots of weird twists while they attempt to explain stuff about him that would've been best left to our imagination.

I wish I found this kind of stuff scary, but I still have yet to find a game that can scare me. That said however, the original game was plenty fun to watch people play, and after having watched the QL, I'm willing to wager that this one is too.

Eight pages was one of the biggest wastes of my time. And my time is worth absolutely nothing. It's not a scary game in the slightest, maybe the random loud sound effects are, but that's about as scary as playing an air horn next to someone sleeping. The thing about Slenderman is, there's no gameplay. You can't "run away" since Slenderman doesn't move, he just appears. There is no chasing, there is no hiding, there is no strategy. All you can do is walk around and hope the RNG is on your side.

I will say, this game definitely has a lot more atmosphere, but seeing as the second level is the same crappy running around the woods, I'll gladly not give a damn and wait for A Machine for Pigs or play the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief 3 again.

I watched the first two seasons (I think round 50 episodes total) and I agree the last stuff got a bit... thick in the plot. I still intend to watch the third season though, just during a week I don't need to sleep >_>

When we watched it, there were only I think 23 episodes. It was the first "run" basically, and then there was a lengthy wait for more episodes. By the time more came around or at least came to my attention, Slender stopped being a thing for me. You could probably get the real Slender Man to attack me and I'd be no more more afraid of him than any other lanky scrawny guy with pantyhose over his head.

FUCK. THAT.

I don't really get this game. I'm a massive coward so I'm scared quiet easily but isn't this just startling? I just don't see what's so scary about it, it just seems like it consists basically of jump-scares. Of course the atmosphere is what makes it good, but I was watching the video thinking (again: I'm a massive coward!) "Oh hey, the screen flickered. Why did it do that? Oh I guess because there was a guy in suite standing near a tree somewhere? Okay..."

This was one of the best Giant Bomb videos in recent memory. That was an awesome quick look.

I love scared Ryan. This quick look was awesome.

"She clearly has been seeing the Slender Man."

"Like, on the side?"

This and Ryan screaming was the most fun I'll probably ever have with anything Slender related. Still gonna try this one out too though.

wow. that was amazing actually.

@twill: pfft. Video games made by people who don't really know how to make video games based on mythology that was designed by committee on a message board are the SCARIEST.

Slender man hype is grown men watching my little pony level of dumb.

@serverfull: I now had the exact same problem. Heres what I read on their forums and what fixed it for me: Disable your antivirus while you're downloading and install it. It should work. Then of course re-enable it ;)

oh man, that'd probably result in a lot of broken oculus rifts, as people freak out and rip them off.

How did the original Slender ever got popular is beyond me. It looks like crap and relies heavily on the fact that you are scared shitless of walking in the woods at night and loud noises. I'm sorry but ear-rape is not scary.

But I guess it's a good thing it did, because this new one looks a lot better. I might get it... someday. And that was one entertaining quick look :')

Edit: You know what ? I actually thing I'm not going to get this. This isn't much better. And I got my fill with this Quick Look.

@rodin said:

Why would you watch it so early? 3:00am seems way more appropriate.

I have that same problem with fisher cats. Their calls sound like a woman being horribly murdered. First time I heard one was a night as I was ascending my back porch steps. I grabbed a weedwacker as a weapon and ran into the woods thinking my neighbor was being attacked. What I found was a fisher cat meowing in the dark.

Oh man fantastic Quick Look! That was a lot of fun to watch lol.

I once heard someone call freaking out and describing shit from the plot of Halo as if it was really happening. It was pretty awesome. Noory didn't have a clue and was treating it like a "real" UFO call.

Oh man.

Anyone know if somebody keeps archives of Coast to Coast prank stuff. I'd love to hear a guy talk about Slenderman on it.

oh god scary games are wonderful

FUCK THOSE FOOTSTEP SOUNDS!

Have you ever actually played Condemned, Amnesia, Fatal Frame, or Siren: Blood Curse?

Plenty of horror games freak me out compared to only a handful of horror movies that have scared me.

Psychological horror is best, this kinda stuff doesn't really scare me anymore.

Had to watch this quick look in the white version of the site to get as much light as possible!

Holy fucking shit that's scary.

I never understood why more Slender games and references keep coming out while not a single Z̖̣̋͊̓ͩ͑̂Ã̢͖̜̼̙̉̑͒ͅL̞̮̥͌̃ͯ͗̑̂G̶̗͚̞̩̪͛͛̒̈́̓ͪͮO̝̎̔̌ͮ̐͋̀!̷̪͉̞͈͉͍͍͒͋ͣ͗̓ game has been made.

NOPE

I know the video can only be so long, but it would have been nice to get a little more of a look at non-8 pages parts of the game.

Seems neat.

Oh no! Don't let Slenderman get you! He might stare at you in awkward silence! Come on guys. It's not that scary.

Man that game still scares the bejeesus outta me hah...love it

This has pretty cool execution. I wish it had an original story instead of this ancient one that has lost all its mystery from years of oversaturation. It would seriously lose little in creepiness if Slenderman was replaced with Herman Munster or something.

Still, it's endlessly funny hearing Ryan and Patrick try to be gung-ho while clearly losing their shit.

Hilarious Quick Look! If Ryan and Patrick played a whole shitload of this on camera I wouldn't be adverse to it.

I don't see the issue with photoshop being used to enhance an urban myth. If we boil all urban myths down in a similar way then they're all just 'some stupid stuff a couple of people thought up and bounced off each other' so is it such a degredation of the concept to attach 'and then someone photoshopped images based on it' to the end?

17:13

A tiny bit of pee came out... I think I need to check this series out.

teleporting asshole...

Horror movies died when slasher movies and shock value movies like Hostel and saw got introduced.

The horror movies that do come out are so predictable because of audio cues and the way they pan the camera at a certain moment. Oh the camera is really close to the actor and won't show much of her surroundings, jump scare coming in 3, 2 , 1 and boo!

@generic_human_robot: No you don't want to play this with an oculos rift. Fucking psycho.

I just watched the first 20 entries because this post intrigued me. I found this quick look scarier.

Throughout this entire QL I kept getting mental images of Patrick just leaping into Ryan's arms Scooby-Doo style. Someone photoshop this. Pls.

@haltiamreptar: It's a pretty particular thing. I also think it's hard to be scared by slenderman when you know about him and know he's supposed to be super scary. The brain kind of defeats that pretty quickly. Like I said, I'm completely unafraid of him now, so nothing with him in it does anything to me. But at the time, I was going in pretty much blind. I didn't even know that the series was supposed to be scary, someone had just heard the name of it and was told to watch it. So we did. Hard to get that same experience now, especially if you aren't watching it in the middle of the night in a house you've never been in in the pitch dark and you're expecting it.

I started watching this last night, got scared and turned it off. Now even during daytime this really scares me too much to watch :D I did see the first 16-17 minutes though ^^

@the_grindilow: Yes, yes you probably will.

Well now, I got some serious sweaty palms just watching that. Fuck that!

@assinass said:

Played 'em all, not a single one got to me though. I've never been scared by a movie either, for what it's worth. I really like the idea of horror games and movies, but I've just never managed to find one that actually resonated with me.

I would love to watch Ryan and Patrick play more of this. But i would hate to play it myself. ;-)