Slender Man game, Slender: The Arrival, could hit the Oculus Rift for a whole new level of terror this Halloween. This is the kind of video game that would really benefit from virtual reality glasses, as it puts you in the shoes of a protagonist who finds themselves searching for notes written about one of the scariest characters ever invented.
Slender Man originated on the website Something Awful as a series of pictures featuring children in various kinds of activity, but there was always a character in those photos who had an ominous presence in the background. A tall, impossibly long-limbed man with a blank white face simply stood straight up, occasionally shown with black tentacles extending from him. The urban legend was that children tended to vanish after seeing the character. He lures them toward him, and nobody knows what happens next.
The YouTube channel Marble Hornets took the urban legend a step further, creating live action episodes that would regularly lead to whoever was holding the camera seeing Slender Man, and then they would race frantically away.
Reported to be Oculus Rift compatible, Slender: The Arrival is the sequel to what was originally a free game called Slender: The Eight Pages . The first game was surprisingly simple and the only way to fail was to see the title character enough times. When this happens, the screen fills with static and you see a blurry picture of Slender and his featureless face.
Most gamer channels on YouTube usually had a video where they played the game and tried to find all eight pages before Slender Man came along and ended the game. Very few memes have ever gone as far as this character has.
Slender: The Arrival is being described, controversially, as the “only official Slender Man game.” Does this mean that Slender: The Eight Pages and all of its free follow-ups were not official canon? If so, how is a sequel the first official game?
The story of Slender: The Arrival centers around a Realtor who is about to show a potential buyer around one of her homes, when the original owner suddenly ends up missing. Now she has to find and piece together clues about why she’s missing, evading the Slender Man as much as possible as she wanders the house and surrounding grounds.
Considering the undeniable creepiness of the game, the Oculus Rift could turn Slender: The Arrival into an experience you will not likely forget, putting the first person perspective Slender Man horror game right in your face.