After all, not being able to save and quit the game means you have to commit whenever you want to tackle Slender and it’s one of the main reasons I haven’t finished the game (the other ten or twenty reasons involve not having enough clean underwear). You run blindly until you’ve got your courage back and then try to figure out where you came from. This is when your brain enters that primitive mode of desperation, screaming at you to abandon the page and just run run as fast and as far as you can into the woods before that THING catches up with you. But when you’ve got that heartbeat pounding in your ears and static creeping into the corners of the screen and then you have to stop to search an area for a tiny little page-well, it’s moments like this which really make Slender a special experience. The pages are easy to recognize, once you’ve spotted them. The maze is also defined by the limited aura of your flashlight, which always seems to illuminate just enough for you to see a glimpse of your pursuer out of the corner of your eye, or just enough of a tree branch to look like something reaching out to grab you. The maze is created by your panic as you quickly keep turning away from anywhere with even a hint of static, unwittingly boxing yourself into a corner. The game shouldn’t feel claustrophobic, with its open outdoor setting, but it does. If you see static on your screen, you’d better change direction: that’s the first sign HE’s appeared somewhere in front of you, in the darkness. Once you collect that first page, you will be spending the next hour of your life running. There is nowhere HE won’t chase you, no save points, no ways to continue your game. It falls in the same vein as Amnesia in that you are being chased by something you can only run from, but even Amnesia had safe zones. It is the most relentless survival horror game I have ever played. With each page you collect, HE will grow smarter and more feverish in his pursuit. Your only option is to avoid HIM and keep collecting the pages.
It will get louder, it will get faster, and when it’s at its fastest you know that HE is near. Or maybe it’s a dank public washroom, the kind you’d expect to find at a poolside but not in the middle of, well, wherever you are. Maybe it’s a brick wall, placed obtusely in the middle of the path. So you stick to the path and eventually you come to something. Your flashlight creates bouncing shadows that make the branches seem like they are reaching out for you. You wake up in the woods in the darkest hours of the night with only a flashlight and the instructions “find eight pages.” You wander for a while down a dirt path-you could veer off into the thick trees, but the forest is more ominous than mysterious.
Escaping from the Nemesis in Raccoon City pounding my way through rooms in the Himuro mansion while being pursued by the unstoppable Kirie desperately fleeing horrifying visions in Amnesia these define what I look for in a true horror experience. "When I think about my favorite fear moments in video games, the ones that come immediately to mind are those in which I’ve had no ability to fight.
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