Atmospheric horror game

Slender is a first-person horror game where your only goal is to find eight manuscripts about the Slender Man, a paranormal creature. It follows a previous game called Slenderman that was based on a similar theme but was nowhere near as scary or successful.

How to play Slender

The myth of Slender started quite simply as a rumor and has also been popularized as an internet meme. The story is that Slender Man is a mythical creature often depicted as a tall, thin figure wearing a black suit and a blank face.

According to legend, Slenderman can stretch or shorten his arms at will and has tentacle-like appendages on his back. Slender Man can cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia, coughing fits (nicknamed “slendersickness”), photographic and video distortions and can teleport at will.\n

The basic premise of the game is the more directly you come in contact with the Slender Man, the faster your sanity drains. You therefore have to careful not to look at the enemy for too long and remember that your flashlight has a limited battery so you must turn it off from time to time to save it. Also, the more you sprint, the lower your maximum stamina becomes, so you must sprint only when you need to.

Is it scary?

Slender does well in creating quite a creepy atmosphere for a very basic game. It feels like just you, your torch and the sound of crickets chirping as you fumble your way through the forest looking for manuscripts. However, the overall aim of collecting 8 pages of the manuscript is quite limited and so the gameplay is a bit limited.

The controls to the game are simple: Mouse — Look around W,A,S & D — Move Left Shift — Sprint Left Mouse Click — Pick up pages Right Mouse Click — Flashlight Q & E — Zoom in/out

Technical issues

Note that you’ll need WinZip or WinRAR to unpack this Slender game download.

Since Slender was originally released, there have been several spinoffs with varying degrees of quality. We tested them on the Softonic staff to see which one is the scariest so don’t forget to check out how they got on:

Conclusion

Slender is an eerie horror game that’s well worth trying whether or not you’ve ever heard of the Slender Man myth.

Added a subtitle to the game (“The Eight Pages”) to differentiate it from future versions.Improved main menu and added music to it. Also now includes links to Slender Man info and YouTube series.Added different light sources (unlocked after beating the game once).Added shadows (not especially noticeable except in lit areas).Your jogging speed now increases gradually as more pages are collected.Removed the cooldown for stamina recovery after jogging/sprinting, and reduced the stamina drain rate. Whenyou start jogging/sprinting, however, it immediately deducts 5% of your stamina. This will allow you to jog orsprint for a much longer period of time, but makes repeated taps of the jog/sprint button cause your staminato drain very quickly (effectively getting rid of a former exploit).The maximum distance you can see decreases as you collect more pages; this is to keep the challenge similarfor people who have fog turned off. For the same reason, Distance Shade can no longer be turned off.Added a menu option to automatically skip the intro.Added a pause feature, but you can only pause if there’s no static (which prevents you from pausing the gamein response to seeing the Slender Man).Fixed a bug where the flashlight would try to illuminate a page on the other side of a wall.Removed one of the hidden modes (it was only a matter of time, since it contained copyrighted material).

Changes

• Added a subtitle to the game (“The Eight Pages”) to differentiate it from future versions.Improved main menu and added music to it. Also now includes links to Slender Man info and YouTube series.Added different light sources (unlocked after beating the game once).Added shadows (not especially noticeable except in lit areas).Your jogging speed now increases gradually as more pages are collected.Removed the cooldown for stamina recovery after jogging/sprinting, and reduced the stamina drain rate. Whenyou start jogging/sprinting, however, it immediately deducts 5% of your stamina. This will allow you to jog orsprint for a much longer period of time, but makes repeated taps of the jog/sprint button cause your staminato drain very quickly (effectively getting rid of a former exploit).The maximum distance you can see decreases as you collect more pages; this is to keep the challenge similarfor people who have fog turned off. For the same reason, Distance Shade can no longer be turned off.Added a menu option to automatically skip the intro.Added a pause feature, but you can only pause if there’s no static (which prevents you from pausing the gamein response to seeing the Slender Man).Fixed a bug where the flashlight would try to illuminate a page on the other side of a wall.Removed one of the hidden modes (it was only a matter of time, since it contained copyrighted material).