Slender: Lost Demo

While it is true that fear is a good motivator and it keeps living beings in a constant state of alertness when they need it, terror is the exact opposite, because all rational thought is banished and it becomes difficult to do anything else, other than freeze into place. Some video games prefer to keep you on edge with a constant streams of terrible demons, such as Doom, while others rely on hidden horrors to play with your mind and make you cower in terror without even showing you a monster.

Slender: Lost is inspired by the original Slenderman series and it’s basically the same game, except for the fact that the location is somewhat different. Hence, you have to find a few pages with messages on them and avoid contact with the mysterious entity living in the forest, which has the power to kill by simply showing itself. It can be a scary experience, but unfortunately not in this case.

The story is a tad different as well, in the sense that it all starts with the main character preparing to go to sleep in his room. As he drifts asleep, a nightmare takes a hold of him, and he is suddenly waltzing through a thick forest. Something tells him that it’s a good idea to collect the pages with warning messages on them, so he begins searching for them up and down the forest.

Gameplay-wise, all you have to do is to walk around in darkness and hope that you can stumble into the pages. You have a flashlight with you to light the way slightly, but it’s still difficult to navigate the forest. Just like in the original title, Slenderman appears from nowhere, and you must face away or turn off the flashlight in order to avoid being killed. Obviously, some of the encounters can be pretty scary, but the atmosphere is not nearly as pressing as it should be in order to make an impression on you.

In very much the same way, the graphics are not at all bad, but the level design expresses nothing, and everything is as forgettable as it is dull. You see a lot of trees and the occasional building, but they all lack the attention to detail and you might as well visit untextured cube models for what it’s worth. To make matters even more frustrating, there are glitches and hangups all the time, which is a sign that the developers did not bother too much with the engine optimization.

Unless you have never made contact with the horror genre, Slender: Lost can probably give you a few jump scares every now and again. However, the game fails to make any impression on those who know what true terror feels like, which means that it has a long way to go before it deserves any attention.