Slender: The Arrival

Search for your childhood friend and elude a terrifying, merciless being

Release: March 26, 2013 (Mac, PC)

By Ian Coppock

I could take up loads of time explaining that the past month has been pockmarked by illness, job hunts, and moving out of my apartment, but these reasons seems mundane in the face of another reason I've been away from Belltow3r Gaming for over three weeks: mainstream games aren't exciting me right now. I hate to say it, but this next generation of console games is about the most soulless and unexciting lineup of "genericism" I've ever seen. Mindless polished shooter after mindless polished shooter. Where's the atmosphere? The enriching stories? Give me a terrain I can traverse, not just stare at from a fixed linear path.

With nothing interesting coming out this summer, I've been reaching back further and further for games that actually present something tangibly atmospheric. I then came to the stunning realization that I'd not yet played Slender: The Arrival, a new horror game that came out this spring. I've probably overlooked it because BioShock Infinite came out on the same day this one did. Needless to say, I've since rectified my gross negligence and am now prepared to spew story and artwork-speak.

The Story

The Arrival is the highly anticipated sequel to Slender, a short indie horror game that came out about a year ago. I reviewed it as part of the Short Horror Week lineup in February for its simple, powerful horror mechanics. I've been playing it as much to get scared as to reduce my body temperature (it's goddamn hot out there). 

In the game, players have to navigate a pitch-black forest, armed only with a flashlight. The goal is to collect eight notebook pages scattered around the environment while avoiding the Slender Men, a tall, faceless creature that will kill you if you look at him for too long.

This game is still the toast of indie horror. Parsec Productions should consider marketing it to the constipated.

Slender: The Arrival takes place sometime after that blood-chilling midnight forest adventure. You are Lauren, a silent protagonist who pops in to visit her close friend Kate, who's just sold a house on the edge of a spooky forest. Upon arriving, Lauren finds the house wrecked and abandoned.

AAAAH! Okay, okay, channel Bob Ross: "Happy little trees there, man..." (sob)

As Lauren searches the house, she begins hearing strange noises and catches glimpses of someone outside. She ignores these, as horror heroines have an unfortunate habit of doing. I have to say that this was an excellent start to creating a spooky atmosphere. Signs of a hasty departure, swinging doors, the sound of crunching leaves... I tensed up so much that you could've taken away my computer chair and I would have kept that pose.

Seriously, don't just shrug that off as nothing. I feel like a tall, pale, faceless dude blocking your exit is SOMETHING.

Lauren is forced to flee the house and search for Kate in the nearby woods, where she must find eight pages hinting at Kate's whereabouts. She gets followed and attacked by an increasingly aggressive Slender Man, who tries to prevent her from learning the truth; he's been tailing and haunting Kate her entire life.

Lauren's search for Kate takes her through some conveniently stringed together and scary environments, including a cavern, a mine shaft, an abandoned radio tower and a park. Players who explore the area thoroughly can find notes of correspondence between Kate and a childhood friend only known as "CR". The pair have bonded over their being followed by the Slender Man. The exchange is hauntingly beautiful and sad. It reminded me of the letters read aloud in Dear Esther.

CR's identity is a mystery, but the letters shed light on the Slender Man and Kate's efforts to avoid him.

Part way through the journey, Lauren is attacked by another antagonist, whom I will call the Masked Man, due to his resemblance to the character of the same name from the Marble Hornets video series. Unlike the stoic Slender Man, who rarely moves and can only attack when being looked at, the Masked Man is a frenzied psychopath who physically chases Lauren. He attempts to beat her to death and relentlessly pursues her. His connection to Kate and the Slender Man is shrouded in mystery... at first. 

Oh this is bullcrap. I paid my ticket at that Marilyn Manson concert, what's his beef with me?

As with all things good and intriguing, there's a lot of spoilable material here that I can't get into. I will say that The Arrival refers to a singular, important event, and that the game hints at the origins of the Slender Man. Until now, all the media concerning him have been pretty quiet on that question.

Lauren's search for Kate while repelling multiple terrible foes makes for an interesting premise, but overall I was disappointed with The Arrival. The game is split across seven very short levels, one of which is a glitzy remake of the original Eight Pages adventure. I beat the game in about an hour and was left grasping for more.

Terrifying, right? I wish Blue Isle had put as much effort into Slender Man as they did the rest of the game.

In addition to being short, the game is repetitive. Each level is essentially a repetition of finding the eight pages, they just swap it out for finding six generators or closing eight windows... or finding eight more pages. There's some exploration involved, but most of the environments are pretty linear and confining.

Frankly, I expected a lot more from a studio that not only promised to be narrative-heavy, but even hired the Marble Hornets boys to write the script. These dudes face off against Slendy in their own Youtube series, and the videos are pretty well done. Because they wrote the story, the game can't not be compared to the story-rich series, and it's a comparison that falls flat.

HEY! Reveal yourself! So that I can care about the characters!

I hate to keep pulling punches on a game I want to really love, but Blue Isle Studios also went too vague on the characters. I know that part of what makes horror horror is keeping everything blurry, but I need some reason to care about these characters. I know next to nothing about this girl I'm supposed to be looking for and I know nothing about my own character except her name. Just a little more to go off of? Please? If you give me more backstory, I'll have more reason to care... and therefore be more terrified. Everyone wins.

Finally, the gameplay is little changed from that of the original Slender. In fact, Slendy is less dangerous than he was in the original. If you look away just as he hoves into view, you're fine. To be fair, they did shake things up by letting him teleport in front of you and, terrifyingly, allowing him to move.

Slender: The Arrival is by all means scary and disconcerting, but the game feels too short, half-finished and skeletal. I think Parsec and Blue Isle saw how well Slender was received and decided little needed to change for the sequel, but all that did was make the game feel shallow. I know too little about these characters. The gameplay is essentially the same level over and over again. Bleh.

The Artwork

Blue Isle Studios designed some beautiful environments for this game. It's not the most elegant mapping I've ever seen, but it gets the job done. The environments do a good job of creating atmosphere; Lauren traverses abandoned and nighttime areas in her search for Kate, and the emptiness of these places piles on the spooky.

Neato! Still do not want to go the hell in there!

I also found the music to be particularly noteworthy. It's slow and mournful, with quick violins and ramping energy whenever you encounter the Slender Man. This combines with the environments to create a sour, scary taste that I really liked. It's just a shame the gameplay and story were so shallow.

Should I get it?

As with Amnesia, I can only recommend this game to horror fans. The Arrival is still a tense and scary game, despite its shortfalls. The Slender Man is a merciless, unknowable fiend, and the Masked Man adds some much-needed flavor to a formula that gets a little much about halfway through the game. It could have been longer, it could have been deeper, but for $10, you could do a lot worse. I guess what I'm trying to say is give this game a miss unless you're a diehard Slender fan. It throws some interesting concepts at the Slender mythos, but stops short of being a satisfying narrative.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. I know it's been a while since I last posted and I'm going to keep going. I've got a lot of other stuff going on, but you can expect at least one review a week from here on out.

Aces of the Galaxy

Battle fleets of aliens in a cutting-edge spaceship

Release: June 4, 2008 (PC, Xbox 360)

By Ian Coppock

Getting into games that came out years ago has helped me forget the ones that have come out recently, not that they needed much help. In total, I've played four games released this year that I thought were worth the attention of the gaming world, and I've already reviewed three of them. My assuredly smug-sounding assertion is based on a combination of subjective personal cynicism and the fact that game sales took a dip for the first time in history this spring. Hopefully, the mainstream gaming world will find a new creative oasis, but I'm today I'm sticking with older games.

So, yeah... Aces of the Galaxy :D

The Gameplay

Like a few other games I've reviewed recently, Aces has no true narrative. The reader who sent me the request asked me to consider the game from the same angle as Minecraft, in that it pulls off other aspects of gameplay so well that narrative becomes unnecessary. We'll see if this game can pull that off.

The game takes place in a space-age war between humanity and a group of aliens called the Skurgian Empire. You play a nameless human fighting against the Skurgians and their leader, Vrax. Aces has a tongue-in-cheek approach to such a conventional space setting, using ridiculous names and cliches to make its premise look all cool and post-modern.

Supreme Overlord Vrax is the primary salivating amphibian of Aces.

The game opens with you stealing a prototype Skurgian fighter from a military lab, and then making your escape from the alien fleet. Like the Star Fox games and more than a few arcade shoot-em-ups, Aces is a rail shooter. Your spaceship is guided along an invisible path in each level.

En route, it's your job to shoot into oblivion as many alien spacecraft as possible, both to rack up high scores and to avoid getting obliterated yourself. The aliens are pissed that you stole their precious spaceship, so they unleash all hell upon you as you make your escape.

I wasn't being disingenuous with that "all hell" example. The game's dogfights are quite chaotic.

With Aces, you don't have to be a hyper-reflexive fighter jockey in order to be good at it. I just flew my ship about wildly while firing nonstop and that pretty much did the job. The game requires no prior skills, really, other than the ability to move a joystick or mouse around in an anarchic manner. The game does only give you three lives, though, for all nine levels of mayhem.

As you fly, the Skurgians will throw patterned fleets of alien spaceships at you. You have to manage dodging their fire while firing back. You have a variety of weapons at your disposal to make this happen, including laser cannons, torpedo launchers and cluster missiles.

You have lots of weapon options in Aces, which comes in handy when the aliens pull out the big guns.

Aces is split into nine levels of spaceborne dogfighting that make for an hour or so of gameplay. What I found rather neato about this game is that after completing a couple of levels in one setting, you get to choose where the next few levels will take place. Granted, there's only three choices (ice field, Earth's orbit, and a star going supernova) but I thought that was a neat little feature. You can pick the same consecutive setting for the whole round or switch it up every chance you get.

In each level, you'll also face off with a Skurgian boss flying an enhanced ship. The aforementioned Vrax is your first nemesis, but if you can shoot him down before the game is over, he'll be replaced by another antagonist leading the aliens in his stead. That antagonist will be replaced upon his death, and so on and so forth. Each enemy will yell at you in a pre-level briefing filled with humorous cliches.

The Skurgian Garbage-Smashers were some of my favorite antagonists. Aces deliberately fills the dialogue screens with cliches to make for humor and references. 

Aces does a lot of things well. It encapsulates the best of old-school rail shooters and keeps the gameplay simple, not simplistic. The game does have a few flaws, some of which are just endemic to rail shooters. The first and most obvious is the lack of freedom. Rail shooters are fun but the inability to deviate from the pre-determined path took away my sense of freedom. I always prefer space shooters in which I can fly around a big map (any Rogue Squadron fans out there?) but this is an issue native to all rail shooters, not just Aces.

There are also a few control issues. The dodging mechanic is... well, dodgy, to be perfectly honest. The idea is to barrel-roll your way out of the path of fire, but sometimes my ship just barrel-rolled without moving anywhere. Unless my barrel-rolling is so badass that the lasers just explode upon touching me (it isn't), the dodging was problematic. There's also a mechanic for scanning invisible ships, but I only used it once, when the game prompted me to. I'm sure that there were some invisible ships in other levels but their threat to me was so minimal that I never needed the scanner. 

The Artwork

Aces is the first game I've reviewed wherein I can safely say that the graphics are average. None of my fancy-dancy sub-mediocre or quasi-lacking-detail jargon, just average. Nothing great, nothing terrible. Yep. Don't really feel like I need to expand on that.

I will say that the game has a great framerate (60 fps), which is handy for when I'm being swarmed by three hundred vessels on the same damn screen. 

Aces does framerate well. Which is awesome, because I'm being teleported through a warp gate alongside an entire alien fleet.

Aces has no spoken dialogue outside of the clicky, raspy sounds of the Skurgians or the beep-boops of robots. The music combines old-school synths with a heroic, 'MURICA-style orchestra that reminded me of old NASA footage. The disconnect between this two styles is evident but hardly a deal-breaker.

The environments in this game are of a massive scale, but because you can't go anywhere other than the rail path, the epicness is more about spectacle than substance. Indeed, much of this game is. You'll soar past huge worlds, giant alien ships and through fields of asteroids, but it's all nothing more than stage props.

AWESOME! I wish I could actually visit! ...

Should I get it?

Aces does enough of what it's going for well enough, so it's not getting out of here without a recommendation. It doesn't make any ballsy leaps, but rather, assimilates all the good about rail shooters and some of the inevitable bad. It takes about an hour to play through all the levels successfully, and the shifting settings equals replay value. For $5, that's not bad.

And now, a special message from the pile of CD cases and Pringles cans that is Ian's desk

I hope you guys know how much I appreciate your readership, and your recommendations. Lately I've been taking nothing but recommendations from everyone, and stopped making a weak narrative a decisive deal-breaker. With that approach, though, I feel like I may be starting to lose focus. I want to return purely to games with strong narratives and characters.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want you to feel bad or resentful if what you see as a great game doesn't fit my idea of a strong narrative. Indeed, such a term is subjective, and if you think a game is beautiful and fun, no one can take that away from you, not even silly critics like me. 

I want you to continue emailing me your ideas. I prefer talking about strong stories because I think those almost always make the best games, and they go a long way towards everyone accepting video games as art. Again, don't take this message as me telling you your games are weak and you shouldn't read. Just because I focus on story doesn't mean your game lacks that for everyone. I think that everyone should play games, and strong stories are a gameplay element everyone can appreciate, which is why I prioritize it.

Thanks for reading! And speaking of strong narratives, the next two reviews are going to be a special double-feature of a psychological thriller series. Some of you will instantly recognize these games, others may not, but check back on Thursday so that we can all enjoy some blood-chilling awesomeness.