Is it worth playing? Maybe eventually, just to see a buggy variant on the classic Slender gameplay. It's functionally a copy of what came before, so how could it turn out to be so inferior? The devil is in the details, and the details here are all strange.īuggy and lacking polish, Night Shadows is full of so many little wonky graphical and gameplay aspects - from cascading autumn leaves that fall impossibly from the sky, physical objects you can walk right through, and an odd green wavy effect alerting you to Slender Man's presence instead of the typical static buzz - that the game actually loops back around to being bizarrely entertaining, precisely because of its unpredictable design. Grab your flashlight - it's time for a walk in the woods.ĭeveloped and published by Basilic Apps, Night Shadows takes almost every move it makes from the playbook Slender: The Eight Pages established: get in the woods, use your flashlight, grab some shiny things, run for your life. Like all genres - and, in this case, exceedingly specific subgenres - there's games in the Slender Man mythos that are must-plays, and some that are so bad they have to be seen to be believed.

All the while, they must evade the roaming Slender Man, an encounter with whom they'll certainly not survive. The games generally place players in a dark locale on the hunt for a number of items, armed with only a flashlight and a limited ability to run. It's no surprise that the creepypasta character has made many appearances in horror-themed video games - most of them short and free, designed simply to scare the life out of you in dark, sometimes poorly-rendered woods.Īfter the release of Parsec Productions' Slender: The Eight Pages in 2012, copycats created a whole cottage industry out of mimicking that game's formula, thereby establishing what a 'Slender Man game' is expected to be. Since his creation on the Something Awful Forums in 2009, the spooky specter known as Slender Man has taken a weird and rambling route through the back alleys of pop culture, being a party to works of art, scary stories, a feature film, and even a real-life attempted murder. No, seriously: watch out for that guy, or you've got to start the whole level over.

Slenderman the arrival full story