Holan: The Resurrection Demo

Slenderman is the perfect example to illustrate the fact that it is fairly simple to scare people if you toy with the correct part of the brain. Hence, there’s no need for millions of horrible monsters from the pits of hell in order to make people feel uneasy, as long as a single weird creature can accomplish the same task, in a much more traumatic way.

Holan: The Resurrection is a survival-horror game that features almost every element from the Slenderman series, yet somehow banks on the fact that no one is going to notice. Everything is right here, including the same environment, the same underlying principle and a similar monster. Moreover, since Unity was used in this case as well, the visuals look the same too.

It becomes even more difficult to differentiate between the two games once you realize that the ‘quest’ is the same. As such, your purpose is to explore the area and find eight missing pages. However, unlike in the original Slenderman, the papers appear to be blank, and you are basically just collecting junk. The creepy texts contributed greatly to the overall atmosphere in the original release, so this is definitely a minus.

Just like in every other horror game, the sound effects are an important piece of the puzzle, because they help a lot with the overall atmosphere and they have the potential to entertain the gamers when nothing else is happening. In Holan: The Resurrection, all you hear are footsteps and a disturbingly repetitive ‘music’ that starts when you find your first piece of paper.

Visually, there’s not much to comment on, because it’s basically Unity all over again, and the engine itself looks nice. The level design is nothing special, on the other hand. You can stumble into the occasional building every once so often, only to enjoy textures glitches and the like. The optimization is atrocious and you can barely raise the detail level without losing performance, even if there’s nothing to see.

While Holan: The Resurrection is not what anyone could call a ‘bad game,' its purpose is a mystery. There are no new elements to improve on the original, it’s just the same thing all over again, which means that there’s no reason to give this a try if you have played Slenderman already.