Slender: The Arrival

Slender: The Arrival is a survival horror game played from a first-person perspective. It takes place in abandoned areas and structures such as forests, buildings, mountains, and a mining facility, each with different objectives. Like in its predecessor, Slender: The Eight Pages, the player is equipped only with a flashlight. Sprinting depletes the player character's stamina, after which it takes time to regenerate, forcing the player to conserve their energy.

Enemies include the Slender Man, who can teleport from place to place with the only option for the player to run away. The player is also chased by the Chaser, who is controlled by the Slender Man. The only way to subdue the Chaser is by focusing the flashlight on its face. The game features the Easy, Normal, and Hardcore difficulties. In Hardcore, which is unlocked after completing the game, the flashlight's battery can deplete and enemies behave more aggressively.

As Lauren arrives in Oakside Park to help her childhood best friend Kate move out of her childhood home, she finds Kate missing, her belongings disheveled, and her bedroom littered with drawings of and messages about a tall, faceless entity known as the Slender Man. As Lauren hears screaming outside, she heads into the dark woods to look for Kate. Looking for clues, she collects eight pages with scribbled drawings before being pursued by the Slender Man, eventually passing out. As Lauren ventures deeper into the woods, she is attacked by the Slender Man, slips down an embankment and passes out.

Lauren regains consciousness in the morning and continues her search, leading her into an abandoned coal mine. Evading the Slender Man and one of his proxies known as the Chaser, she powers an emergency lift and uses it to exit the mine onto a mountainside.

Slender Man is a fictional supernatural character based on a creepypasta by Eric Knudsen. After its 2009 inception, the character and its related lore spread on the Internet, eliciting several fan creations. Among them, Marble Hornets, a YouTube channel known for its horror videos, helped shape the modern version of the Slender Man character. Parsec Productions, the one-man studio of Mark J. Hadley, developed Slender: The Eight Pages, and released it as freeware in August 2012.

Hadley followed it up with Slender: The Arrival in cooperation with Blue Isle Studios, the studio founded by the creative director Alex Tintor and Brendan Frank. They used the Unity game engine. The cooperation was announced in September 2012, shortly after the release of The Eight Pages. The announcement foretold "more levels, improved visuals, and an engaging storyline" as improvements over The Eight Pages.

Slender: The Arrival received mixed reviews, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic. Critics praised the game's soundtrack, atmosphere, and scares, while criticizing its short campaign length and repetitive gameplay. The Arrival has been described as a bigger-budget version of The Eight Pages. Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer called it more polished and structured than the original game. Edwin Evans-Thirwell of GamesRadar+ felt it was largely the same game as The Eight Pages with negligible improvements spread across multiple levels.

Slender: The Arrival's gameplay divided critics. Marty Sliva of IGN called the objectives repetitive and the enemies unfair. Andy Kelly of PC Gamer described the gameplay as challenging but criticized the levels as repetitive and poorly paced, which he found frustrating. Ben Lee of Digital Spy said that the game mechanics made for "quite a dull game". Andi Hamilton of VideoGamer.com described the gameplay as minimal, repetitive, and dull, also feeling that the enemy artificial intelligence was unfair.