Link (YouTube) |
Slender: The Arrival is a modernist art game about the forbidden love between two turn-of-the-century French cobblers. Clocking in at around 100 hours of gameplay (not counting the optional riddle minigames), this sweet-natured narrative is punctuated by sliding block puzzles, tongue-in-cheek dating sections, and a surprisingly robust storefront simulation. It's really surprising the game got as much press as it did, considering its unconventional setting, chipper tone, and brief (but surprisingly explicit) lovemaking scene inside the alien spaceship.
It's a really great title, if you hate found-footage games about murderghosts that make you scream and vomit and throw your keyboard across the room.
And now for an actual true statement: if you want to listen to Chris freak out for thirty minutes like someone taped spiders to the insides of his eyelids, this is a pretty good video to watch.
Today’s content features Josh, Chris, Mumbles, and myself. “But Rutskarn!” you exclaim, “Surely the real star of the video is that despicable cad, the Slender Man!” You're not wrong, dear reader. So the question remains: which of the four of us actually is the Slender Man?
You decide. But decide quickly, and whatever you do, when you watch this video…don't turn around.
Because then you won't be able to see the video. Which is, presumably, in front of you. You have used a computer before, right?
Shamus Plays LOTRO

As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Autoblography

The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round

I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
The Disappointment Engine

No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Object-Disoriented Programming

C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
I feel like there needs to be a game mechanic especially for Reginald Cuftburt in this game whose only purpose is to give the Slenderman a giant middle finder.
What you need is a hardcore mode where all the Duke Nuukem soundboards and emotes are bound to the WASD keys and the Middle Finger of Doom mod action is bound to left mouse
You mean like Firebrand did?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Vg7oCZvlA#t=105s
Huh, that was interesting. Wait… was that supposed to be disturbing?
I find the way filters are often abused in video and images to be QUITE disturbing.
Okay, here’s the thing about Tribe Twelve, Marble Hornets, et cetera . . .
It’s only scary and disturbing if you invest yourself in the alternate “reality” of it. See, half the scary stuff and mood for Marble Hornets (which I watch as it’s the one with the LEAST amount of ARG and excess satellite crap attached to it) . . .
It needs you to stop thinking “this effect on the video means someone didn’t turn off their EMF pump” or “but why would someone’s first instinct be to film it rather than drop the camera and run” . . .
Like any piece of fiction, there are things you need to put in a box by the door and approach again. If you let it work from the assumption “this is a real retelling through video blog type records” and let the cues work on you? It turns out to not need to do anything other than let subtle audio cues (minor distortions) show up to let you know something’s off which otherwise wouldn’t raise the alarm.
This is why I don’t share it around to friends all that much. The first time I did a friend didn’t let themselves get taken into the fiction and jokingly asked for the six hours he spent trying to understand it back.
It’s Josh. Obviously, Josh is the Slender Man.
“But Jarenth”, I hear you say, “Isn’t Josh way too much of a chaotic, bumbling oaf? Isn’t he literally the farthest any human being could be from being the Slender Man?”
That’s what he wants you to think.
I don’t know, I think we can rule him out on account of him being not-a-human-being, and therefore not a man. We can also rule out Chris for being a scared little girl, and therefore also not a man.
The prime suspect would have to be the manliest of them all, Mumbles. Although there is also a fair share of suspicion on Rutskarn, who is slender to the point of being skeletal.
But Rutskarn is almost as short as I am. And as the above video clearly demonstrates, Slenderman is at least 3 meters tall.
But you didn’t look at his feet. If you had, you would have noticed the four-foot tall platform shoes.
That’s why you can outrun him, you know.
Please. The Slenderman is just Shamus when his microphone is on the fritz and his connection to Twitch is acting flaky.
He’s just trying to ask everyone nicely to restart the stream so he can connect properly, but Josh keeps ignoring him.
Jerk.
No Slender man is Shamu—‘s GFX card when he tried to stream Dues Ex 1, its become sentient, ITS ALIVE!
Mumbles. It gotta be Mumbles!
Chris said, Slenderman eats its victims, so I mostly agree with you.
BUT what if it secretly really is Chris? How does he know all the things about Slenderman? Why does he know the house and woods so well? Because he’s “played the game before”? Yeah, that’s what I would tell people, if I were Slenderman.
Chris is the perfect disguise, he can watch Josh play the game, then suddenly teleport from his computer into the woods to annoy Josh and keep him from finding the last piece of paper. Perfidious!
There is no Chris.
Josh suffered a horrible tragedy during the Bioshock season that broke his mind. Chris was created as the broken pieces of Josh’s psyche coalesced into a vague coherence. Chris is a cracked reflection of Josh – so interested in the narrative and the story in ways Josh usually scorns. Neither Chris nor Josh realizes this.
There is no Slenderman game.
The one piece of common ground Josh and “Chris” have is their mutual appreciation of videogames. At night, Josh dreams of playing non-existent videogames as the two fragments of his shattered mind desperately try to communicate.
The Slenderman himself is the manifestation of the narrow cracks in the wall that separates the two halves of Josh’s mind. This is why Chris is so frightened of them – if Josh heals his mind, Chris’ very existence is threatened. This is why Josh runs to them – Josh deep down senses the only escape from the “game” that he and “Chris” are playing is through the Slenderman.
Josh is Josh. Josh is also Chris. Josh and Chris are the Slenderman.
Josh is well known to cause computers to malfunction when he gets near. So he is obviously the prime candidate.
How this episode managed to be titled anything other than “The Bear Joke” is the tragedy of our times.
I love how the bear joke is just randomly sprinkled throughout and is just a ridiculously long setup for a pun that Rutskarn explains at the very end of the video. Also, this game does look like the answer is almost always “too much” for how much you paid.
Oh, there were so many bear in the woods jokes that needed to be made.
Yeah, it really reminded me of the Face/Off pun from the Amnesia special.
No doubt about it. That joke was barbearic.
Gonna eat your Mumbleface.
Like I’m winnin’ a Mumblerace
Just show me your Mumbleface…
For that first level, it looked like you had telekinesis based around your elbow.
…Maybe you should have tried opening the Slenderman with your elbow-powers?
“…As I stared into his blank face, longingly, he seemed to smile.
‘I want you,’ I said, coyly.
‘@@(*@$^%#<<,' he replied, with that typical slender suave.
He teleported closer, reaching down to embrace me. I felt safe in his electonic-interfering touch. I felt my psychic powers activate once more. By instinct, I pulled my hand back and out, opening the slenderman and pulling him closer to my quivering flesh…"
Why do I imagine this being read in the Dolphin-lover voice?
Because clearly you hate yourself and require re-education.
Oh hey, Rutskarn wrote a blog post. I feel like something like this has happened sometime before, but can’t quite remember… Eh, must be imagining things.
I like the fan theory that Slenderman only goes after people who hurt or molest children. That would explain the childish drawings and notes, and the significance of the missing child poster. Put up by him to guilt the main character. It would mean that the main character of this game actually did something to deserve this instead of just being a random victim.
It would also explain why Slenderman is not scary at all, ever, under any circumstances. He’s the good guy. He’d only be scary to bad people.
He’s basically Batman, if you think about it.
I dunno, I’ve seen this Batman character on TV and he’s not very slender.
I like this theory.
It also kind of aligns with the fact that all of the characters in the video series versions of the mythos are kind of jerks.
…
I now want to make a story from slenderman’s point of view, as a super-hero fighting against the evils of child-molesters and the like.
Slenderman, meet Little Lamplight.
That’s kind of the plot of the (loosely adapted) Slender Man movie “The Tall Man”
oh, um, spoilers.
Except… I’m pretty sure there at the end Slenderman dropped trou on Josh’s little girl avatar, so…
Also, running around in the woods collecting pages being chased by some mysterious foreboding evil? It’s Alan Wake! If Alan Wake hadn’t made the baffling decision to also be a shooter.
Seriously, if nothing else, this game illustrates for me that Alan Wake could have ditched it’s entire combat mechanic and been a viable (and almost certainly better) game.
Does Slenderman have a coffee-based level though?
Coffee? I LOVE coffee!
I bet you don’t even know how right you are. Especially in the abandoned mine level.
Chris, I don’t know whether you were legitimately scared or just acting the entire time. Honestly, it could be either one.
That sounded like legitimate fright to me – I had similar reactions to slender around a year ago, while I was going through a 2 year stint of severe anxiety problems.
The problem with fears born out of anxiety issues (like a fear of slenderman, where even watching this would terrify – I know I wouldn’t be able to sleep after watching this if I watched it a few months ago), is that they can’t be defeated with logic. What they can be defeated by, however, is a 2 step strategy – which I will tell you, as it is quite interesting.
EDIT: I did not realise that this was such a massive wall of text. Sorry about that.
Firstly, realise what it is. As soon as you feel anxious, take the anxiety out. Imagine it as a little person, if you will, sitting on the table in front of you, freaking out. It doesn’t take to logic kindly – because it just says “…but what if slenderman was right outside your window? You don’t know, because you haven’t looked! You must take protective measures.”
At this, you would usually freak out. But by taking the anxiety out, you can see that it’s just being dumb. There are other steps you can take to disassociate yourself from the little anxiety man, which are unique to you, so I won’t detail any here.
The second step is SCIENCE. Experiment with your fear – expose yourself to varying degrees of what you fear – and analyse it. Analyse how you are feeling, how you are reacting. This allows you to think of the anxiety as just a response that isn’t part of you – a response of something else, and thus it becomes easier to ignore.
The secret third step is to stop avoiding the anxiety. I use to freak out and lock my door at night, because otherwise I’d get anxious that something would come into my room and do something nasty to me. By locking my door, my anxiety reduced – I became more relaxed, I felt much safer. But, this is the worst thing you can do. It encourages the anxiety to grow, to become worse – it teaches it that the thing it fears is actually a danger, and you must take protective measures to keep you alive. So, figure out the rituals you have created to avoid the anxiety and, one-by-one, remove them.
I find the psychology of fears and anxiety to be very interesting – especially since I conquered my fears of the dark and slenderman.
Thanks for this! It’s actually pretty helpful when dealing with the old arachnophobia.
Ughhhh!That is the worst long joke Ive heard in quite a long while.And Rutskarn told it in such an unbearable fashion.
The worst was that he’d paws for minutes at a time while telling it.
I hope he doesn’t make one of these long jokes everytime they do ahorror game. That would just be pandaring.
Unfortunately, it may be required by a claws in his contract.
It is his cross to bear.
It’s definitely a black mark on his already polarizing record. But at least he doesn’t panda to the crowd.
(I guess that means we’re getting the “Fly on a pond” joke next time.)
Flag on the pun -Pandas are not actually bears.
Giant pandas are in the family Ursidae, which makes them bears. Red pandas are not, but usually giant pandas are the panda meant when pandas are mentioned.
So in conclusion, your facts are the ones that are spotty, not TraderRager’s.
Calm down, man. Despite all your rage, you’re still just a trav in a cage.
It’s still very refreshing to see them play a game without much violence and grizzly looking mutilated organs organs.
Although I wish I could’ve seen the cast’s faces when he finally wrapped it up at the end. That would have been a Kodiak moment for sure.
Didn’t he wrap it up in the middle first, then just repeat the bar-bit-you-ate part at the end? I know I heard that way before the end of the video, right after he did the “or take drugs” section.
So, less of a super-long setup, and more of a repeating-himself. :-(
Hey cool,now everyone has an embarrassing nickname:
Shamoose,Butskarn,Yeoman Chambers,Bogo and Pee-pants.
I dunno -I think I preferred pooty-pie. Maybe if we combine the two?
Potty-pee?
Pooty-pants.
Chris ‘Campster’ Pooty-pants.
Carrot-carrot-pooty-pie-carrot-carrot.
Sad as it is, I can’t really see Josh and the Slenderman working out, because Josh constantly refuses to face up to the relationship and just runs away all the time.
“bar bit you ate” was pretty epic. I thought the joke was going to be a much shorter accent joke:
A bear walks into a bar and says “I’ll have a beer.”
The bartender says, “sorry, we don’t serve bears.”
The bear says, “okay, I’ll have a rum and coke.”
Wow, I couldn’t ever take this game seriously. Slenderman looks so derpy in his suit. That’s not scary, not the least bit!
Also, be glad that you didn’t get to the later levels. I’ve seen them, and they aren’t very well made. The little Gollum guy that aggressively follows you is incredibly annoying and so badly designed.
I agree, Slenderman is the least scary thing in the game. (Apart from maybe the malfunctioning doors!) I found the original game quite tense up until I saw him for the first time, at which point I burst out laughing because his long arms and cartoonish appearance reminded me of Inspector Gadget.
After that, every time he showed up I’d walk straight up to him because putting up with the static was more annoying than dying, and soon enough I realised I didn’t care about finding the pages and quit. I guess the game has merit as something to dare your friends to play? I don’t feel like there’s ever any intrinsic motivation to complete the level, even in this version.
So…take this game, remove the annoying static effects, and replace Slenderman with a few Weeping Angels. Fixed!
There’s a Minecraft mod for that.
Your link is broken.
My favourite moment is when Josh walks past the building and Slenderman is inside, but because he’s so big, you don’t see his head. He stands there, looking at the piece of wall above the window. DERP WHERE IS PLAYER NOW
Argh why are you calling him POOdiepie?
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to sound like “few”-diepie.
Is it some kind of word-play stealth insult?
It sounds even sillier than how it’s written.
Gah! now I sound like a nitpicking jerk!
I’m sorry.
Wouldn’t it actually be Pew as in few, die as in DIE BART and pie as in 3.1415… ?
But nobody pronounces the “die” part like that. Why?
The name comes from pew as in ‘Pew-Pew lazers’ with pie added on presumably because PewDie was already taken or something. So pew-dee sounds a lot more like a laser gun sound and is how he pronounces it too (and how the official wikipedia page pronunciation suggests :P)
They’re trying to ward off the spirit of terrible let’s plays by not invoking his name.
It’s decided- I’m buying Tolkien’s estate and making Mumbles the canon voice for Gollum, who will then narrate my new game Riddler VS Tolkien Universe.
Also, “opening up a crate of Slenderman” made me think “Snap into a Slenderjim.”
There needs to be a mod for this that replaces the scary sound effects with Macho Man Randy Savage quotes.
I like Josh’s theory that Slenderman is essentially Casper, just trying to make friends.
Slender the Friendly Ghoul.
Slendamann’s one thing I just don’t get. There are so many so much scarier things on the internet.
Slendermann? A Slenderman/TF2 crossover would be the most hilarious and least scary thing ever. Popping out of nowhere to try to insta-kill you? So Slenderman is basically a Spy. And Spies aren’t that hard to deal with. Pyro’s just going to shoot some flame at a corner and reveal him and then everyone’s going to see him and shoot him. And I mean judging by how Josh just gets by running from Slenderman he’s not a very good Spy either. Probably just the kind that is running obviously towards my Sentry and dies in a few hits from my Southern Hospitality.
In some of the earliest works of the Slender Man mythos (for example, Just Another Fool), Slender Man is depicted with a dapper fedora. The common perception today, however, never features any headwear, instead revealing the Slender Man’s exaggerated baldness to the world.
The hats will be his…
I was so disappointed those were recycle symbols on the boxes at around 18:17. At first glance, I thought they might be Aperture Science logos.
And while I’m not going to go look for it, I’m pretty sure that’s a crossover fanfic somewhere.
I love the idea of GLaDOS trying to get Slenderman to use the portal gun and him just teleporting past all the obstacles.
It also makes me wish I could make a game that had a lot of those “screw with the player” gimmicks where, say, that WAS an Aperture logo, but it changes the second it pans out of frame and you look at it again.
I’d do it with LOADS of things, but really innocuous stuff like address numbers, book titles, etc. and make it on the random side so it’s hard to replay the game and specifically see it happen.
On your way to school a friend tore out the pages of your homework after an argument you had with him and threw them into the wind where they flew out in very far and different directions. The point of the game is to recover the pages from your homework so you can go back to school while giving the cold shoulder to your friend who’s repeatedly trying to make you acknowledge him so that he can apologize for what he did.
How’s that for a friendlier version of the Slender Man game?
So… is it different when you’re playing? Because I didn’t see anything scary.
Annoying, yes. Scary, no.
Also -are the special powers required to f*#& Dr. Strange? That seemed to be the implication of meeting Slenderman in Mumble’s monologue.
I was more spooked by the silence and the anticipation of seeing something in the house than I was of the actual Slenderman when he showed up.
12:15-23
You’re a married man, Chris. Go cry to the Misses. Whiner.
PS: Really is the least of your problems.
22:00-05
I wonder if Slender’s head was clipping through the ceiling…
Right then, so it’s the same game only more annoying.
At least this was a barrel of laughs. Thanks for doing this guys. xD
I think you guys could make tic-tac-toe fun to watch.
Shamus is the only one not here, he is Slender.
Nah. Slenderman spent the episode eating him. All future appearances by Shamus will be Slendy using the shattered echo of Shamus’ soul to mimic his voice.
“Hey, who turned out the lights?”
“Screw Kai Leng!”
“In the ORIGINAL Fallout…”
“Rock climbing, Joel. Rock climbing.”
*twitch* *twitch*
We’ll find out if this is true when Slenderman starts complaining about stuff unrelentingly.
“Argh, I totally got him that time, but he clipped right through me, what are the QA testers doing? There’s no way that kid should be able to outrun me, that is such bullshit! They don’t let me move even one step to make sure I get him, for no raisin.”
Well.. that was different. There’s some proof that Mr. Slender may just be a dude looking to borrow 20 dollars.
To be fair, it’s not made clear if he ever intends to return the $20. I hate guys like that.
I love this joke enough that I’m going to explain its origin:
So Marble Hornets is a Slenderman based youtube web series; the original slenderman-based web series, shortly following the SA thread he was invented in and subsequently derailed (If you can find that thread with some google-fu, check it out, it’s probably the scariest slenderman stuff. The thread was originally for images with paranormal stuff photoshopped in, then around page 6 some guy invents slenderman and almost nothing but slenderman stuff is posted for the rest of the thread). It set the ‘found footage videocam distortion’ convention that has now been endlessly copied as a way to mirror the origin of Slenderman as an image medium.
Here’s the intro episode if you feel like some background info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI
randomly interspersed through the first 10 or so episodes, before the main character had figured out what was going on, were ‘entries’ set in a blacked-out house with no audio, featuring nothing short clips of the Slenderman walking in front of a window. Someone, likely as a way to dull the scary (in 2009 this was some seriously 2spooky stuff), posted a video claiming to have found the missing audio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBnEHT-fBo
It’s appropriate that the joke came out of that episode (installment? edition?) because it’s the worst one in terms of verisimilitude. Slendy looks like a manakin being held at an angle and moved past the window, probably because he is. I like to imagine Slendy doing some kind of panicked Kermit the Frog voice as he does it.
At least he used to move back then.
Rutskarn: About the blur, you’re viewing the game through a camcorder the whole time.
one of the few times i watch one of our videos and think to myself “man we’re fucking hilarious”
I wholeheartedly agree, and that’s why you need to show up for the Diecast more often. I mean, I understand not being able to attend from time to time, but missing 4 out of the last 8? Come on. Who else is gonna fill in these guys on Batman and other superhero trivia?
hey! i have a bad schedule to be awake at any time except 2am.
and i keep thinkin they’re going to do DLC i dont care about
Wait, there is Diecast DLC? Is it just extra skins, or are we talking new hosts/topics?
Mailbag questions are on disk DLC. Everyone’s too cheap to pay which is why we never get to hear them
As Slenderman will no doubt prove, the trouble with the cast’s skins is that there are only five of them.
As for hosts, that depends on how the rituals go and if we get enough “volunteers.”
I think the Amnesia one was even better. Everything forever will pale before that pun.
I really don’t get darkness and poor visibility as a source of scariness in vidya, it just gives me a nagging feeling that I need to mess with my settings and doesn’t do a whole heap of good for my motion sickness because it turns everything into a swirling haze of mush and trashes immersion.
I have two things to say about motion blur, head bob, that crazy skipping motion and the juddering, distortion and other interface fuckery; 1: HUERRRGH! and 2: YEURRRGH!
Is this really it? A crappy orienteering game with no map or directions, reducing it to a pixel hunt, and a bunch of interface screws to attempt to creepify it?
Reading this back, I seem excessively mad. I blame Rutskarn and/or nausea. Maybe they’re the same thing.
Alright, now I feel vindicated after seeing that this game manages to be impossibly lame, as I always believed it must be, on account of Slenderman being the most boring, half-assed waste of meme that ever was.
HOWEVER:
While I was watching this, a painting on the wall directly above me broke one of the crappy hangers I hung it with and swung down inches behind my head. So yes, Chris, I know that feel.
Hey, Campster, there is another level. And in it, it’s not just you and Slenderman. There are others. Here’s a link to prove it. It starts at 10:38.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uct86V2AIXE
Sleep tight :D
Ha! When that thing came running around the corner after you, that was pretty freaky. But I could feel the effect starting to quickly subside after that first time. Making monsters consistently scary is hard. :/Slender popping up when they were crawling was a pretty awesome period on the situation though.
Slenderman sounds like a mascot for an artificial sweetener.
I was thinking it sounds like the “masculine” brand of the people behind http://skinnygirlcocktails.com/
I dunno, getting Dr. Strange powers seem like it would be more trouble than it’s worth, all that talking about incomprehensible things and having to fight insanely huge threats to get any panel time at all must wear on you. Slendy would hardly be even a speedbump.
I vote you get Deadman powers! Ghost 4 life.
SCP Containment Breach does the mechanic better then Slender, where once you see SCP-173 it will kill you if you break eye contact unless there is a barrier i.e closed door. SCP-173 is more of a threat then Slender plus there are the other enemies in SCP that you have to worry about and you actually have a clear goal.
interestingly for me, the better graphics in arrival make the actually less scary than than the original slender. i dunno but the wonky shaky cam and flashlight and darker environment make it harder to see slender as he slowly closes in on you.
Soon after watching this, I was sent to the Clueless Gamer bit where Conan O’Brien plays Slender, and each of these enhanced the other. I recommend it!