free download slender and the eight pages

Since it’s free, it’s worth checking out for the things it gets right, and Slender fans will be interested for historic purposes, as this title has spawned a sequel and at least one notable competing project. Rather than push into new or more varied forms of interactive storytelling, Slender: The Eight Pages shows us a very conservative take on what could have been cutting-edge horror fiction.

There’s fun to be had here, but the project seems to miss the point of the Slenderman phenomenon on a fundamental level.

Visuals are adequate to the task if a bit repetitive, and scale well enough to run on midrange laptops with reasonable fidelity and speed. This game’s origin as a conceptual demo speaks to the limitations of its gameplay, but viewed as a simple, creepy game of hide-and-seek, there’s a charm here that can hold interest for a short while, or entertain younger gamers for whom scares are fun but gunfire and gore are inappropriate.

Video options are pretty basic, but they do get the game to run smoothly on lower-end systems. This is presumably a horrible event, but since we don’t get to see anything past a fuzzy static fadeout, who knows? Audio cues and visual distortions alert you to his presence, allowing you a window to escape, but as you collect more pages this window narrows and he becomes harder to avoid. There are no weapons, no hit points, no inventory, no crouching to hide or any other forms of entertainment to interrupt the purity of the experience, which boils down to collecting eight pages nailed to things scattered throughout the dark woods before Slenderman catches up with you.

Free download slender and the eight pages