Let me start by saying that Slender: The Arrival is a scary game. It is a solitary experience that borders on insanity. Now most games are solitary but this is one of the few where you truly feel alone in the world. Even Silent Hill has denizens lurking about, not so much here. This is actually one of the things that makes it so terrifying. There isn’t anyone else around much of the time to say “Hey! It’s only a game”. The fact that you are alone with your thoughts creates an environment that hits closer to home and that is exactly what the creators behind this journey into surrealism were shooting for.
Shock had a chance to speak with Alex Tintor, one of the mad men responsible for bringing Slender Man to the gaming public. He and original creator Mark Hadley wanted to bring you an experience like no other in the horror genre. I’d say they’ve succeeded.
SHOCK: Where did you come up with the idea of Slender?
Alex Tintor: Well I didn’t create the character itself but I sort of stumbled across it two summers ago while browsing some internet gaming news website. I saw everybody raving about this experimental game called Slender: The Eight Pages. I didn’t think much of it at the time but I got home and downloaded it. It was this really simple game that kind of blew me away with its simplicity but it was down right terrifying.
So we contacted the guy who created that game, Mark Hadley, and asked him if he’d like to partner up to create a bigger and better version of the game. Do it right; do a proper story, throw in a bunch of levels, nicer graphics, and everything went from there.
SHOCK: I would imagine that it doesn’t normally go that easy.
Tintor: Yeah, it was interesting. I emailed the creator, who was a really nice guy who had stumbled into this as well. He kinda said yes on the spot and we went from there.
SHOCK: Can you give us some back story on the characters in the game?
Tintor: The primary character in the game is Slender man himself. This is a character that we intentionally left mysterious and ambiguous. But he tends to stalk his victims in a rather creepy manner.
As for the game itself, it revolves largely around two characters, Lauren and Kate. You play a realtor friend whose come to the house to help sell it. You stumble across the house and realize that something has gone horribly wrong and everything kind of runs from there.
One thing we tried to do carefully is instead of the game really focused around fictional characters, we wanted players to step into the game and play as themselves. So that is why we haven’t done a huge character driven focus to the game, we wanted it to be a more personal story. We want people feel like they are playing as themselves and you are experiencing it first hand. So we sort of left the characters vague as well. There are back-stories but they’re left kind of minimal.
SHOCK: Is this something you hope to franchise?
Tintor: We would do another game if we felt there was something compelling to do. As of right now we don’t have any plans to go much further, other than the console releases on Playstation and Xbox, but it is largely fan driven. The only reason we’re launching on consoles is because people really wanted it. We had planned this as a PC only release. But people said they wanted it on consoles so we’re putting it on there. But for now, we’re gonna leave (the story) here.
SHOCK: What do you hope players take away from it?
Tintor: We really want people to have a personalized experience. We took environments and changed them so players could add to it in their mind. What we did with Slender is make the environments familiar yet add something so it still throws you off. For instance, you’ll notice that the sun sets really fast. It’s one of those things that tells you something is a little off.
The one thing I want people to do when playing Slender: The Arrival is go into the game with an open mind. It’s not a traditional experience. I want people to refer to childhood experiences, back when everything was just a bit creepy.
