The PC's slimmest horror experience fattens up for consoles
The Arrival isn't terrifying because of Slender Man, an internet phantom born of 'creepypasta' photo editing - it's terrifying in spite of him. Slender Man is, once you peel away the mystique, just a tall chap in a suit with some tatty old cling-film where his face should be, who's given to hanging around leafy towns in search of wayward children. True, you can't kill him, and yes, he can sprout smoky tentacles, but next to, say, Pyramid Head's cleaver, these appendages are about as fearsome as Kermit the Frog's biceps.
The trick is, you're never given a clear look at Slender Man. Crucial to this strategy is the camera - an actual digital camera with a flashlight, carried by the player's little-spoken protagonist - which glitches and whites out at the merest hint of a vagrant of tapering proportions. This means that survival is about avoiding the sight of the thing that's hunting you while somehow keeping track of it. Slender Man's ability to teleport doesn't help - sprint for your life and he may simply warp in front of you, especially later in each level. And then there's the audio, which ratchets up from a leaden pulsing to teeth-jangling squawks of radio static. After five minutes of this, you'll be fumbling for the volume control.
After 45 minutes - roundabouts how long it takes to speed-run the game on Normal difficulty - you may not be quite as bowled over. The Arrival's nine chapters are mostly reworkings of concepts and approaches from the original Slender: The Eight Pages, in which players had to gather items scattered part-randomly around a small nighttime environment. It's a great setup that, unlike the vast majority of horror games, remains harrowing each time you take it out for a spin. Slender Man becomes more aggressive for every object collected (or, in the newer sections, activated), so chapters always build to a nail-biting crescendo, however successful you are in the early stages. But Arrival's elaborations on the theme aren't very memorable and, inevitably, the puppetry starts to lose its charm.
The best of the chapters pits you against not just Slender Man, but a raggedy tearaway who's much less lethal (it'll take her several attempts to polish you off), noisier and averse to light, but much more mobile. You'll run into her in a new underground environment that's easier to navigate than the forest from Eight Pages, but no less unpleasant - a maze of long corridors part-blocked by shipping crates, with plenty of blind corners. Slender Man and his protégée are masters of the tag team finish: avoid one enemy, and the other may pounce when you turn around. It's a shame the technology doesn't do the execution justice: the new enemy's primitive animations rob her interventions of impact, though the echo of her approaching footsteps is undeniably traumatic.
There's also an entertaining flashback mission for the Xbox 360 version of the game, in which a side character explores a haunted farm. You'll have to traverse the central cornfield several times in order to reach the other areas - a church, a warren of catacombs and a ruined silo. Suffice to say that the cornfield isn't as innocent as it seems, though there's something dangerously soothing about the hiss of wind through the stalks.
Other missions lack lustre, however. The finale is a sprint to the exit amid billowing fire - somewhat deadening and deflating, after the shifting suspense of the first few levels. The second flashback episode - which drops you into the body of a child - is more of a window on the wider narrative than a convincing extension of what the developers achieve elsewhere; this wouldn't be as disappointing, I guess, if the narrative itself were anything more than a hodgepodge of half-baked urban legends and scribbled, piecemeal asides in place of proper character development.
Slender is an interesting, even essential but not very well-developed curio, a resilient meme that doesn't quite hold up as an actual game. Survival horror fans should definitely check out the trialor download the free PC original, but anybody looking for a chiller with serious legs may want to give this gangly spectre a miss.
