Stalked by a Slender Man

                A plethora of things can be achieved in five minutes.  A person can make a sandwich, run a mile, drive to work, or even get the pants scared off of them by a free horror game.  The next few posts will revolve around some of the best gaming scares I have experienced for free.  There are not many of them, but the few I have played granted me a great amount of unease.  And so, without further ado, I present to you Slender: The Eight Pages.

Simple, yet ominous.

                This whole game is built around the internet phenomenon known as the Slender Man.  Back in 2009, a “paranormal pictures” photoshop contest was launched on the Something Awful Forums.  The contest required participants to turn ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images by digital manipulation and then to pass them off as authentic photographs on a number of paranormal forums.  The users began creating sharing their paranormal creations usually with some kind of eyewitness account to accompany them.  On June 10^th, Victor Surge posted two black and white photo graphs of unnamed children with a short description of “Slender Man” as a mysterious creature who stalked children.  The Slender Man generally appears as an abnormally tall man in a black or grey suit, red or black tie, and white shirt, with no eyes, mouth or clearly defined facial features.  He can also be seen sprouting black tentacles from his body.  With these photographs, a great Internet Urban Legend was born.

The images that started it all.

                The popularity of Slender Man has skyrocketed over the past few years and that prompted this game into creation.  The game is possibly one of the simplest I have played in recent memory.  Sessions in the game can last from about 5-10 minutes depending on how long you stay alive or just how good your are at avoiding slendery death.  In Slender: The Eight Pages, the mission is straightforward: collect as many of the scattered pages as you can before Slendy catches you.  It sounds simple enough, but it can actually be quite terrifying.

Each pages looks as though a terrified child was the illustrator.

                The game starts you off in the middle of forest during the dead of night.  All you are given in order to accomplish your task is a trusty flashlight.  As you move around the forest you run across certain landmarks, like a building with tile floors, a truck, gasoline tanks, a large pipe, and more.  These are places that the pages will most likely appear at, but the location is randomized so each playthrough could be different.  This leads to a large amount of uncertainty about where you should head to first when the game begins.  After you find your first page is when things begin to get creepy.

As soon as you grab your first page, things turn bad.

                As soon as the first page is found a slow, yet steady bass beat begins to play like a bass note on the piano.  It continues throughout, slowly building tension.  When this music starts, the Slender Man begins to appear.  He doesn’t move when you look at him; he just appears.  Numerous times I would round a corner and there Slendy would be, just standing there watching me.  You cannot look at him for a prolonged amount of time.  Looking at him causes the screen to be overcome with static and you will die.  When he shows up, the best bet is to run away, but he will follow you slowly and silently.

Always watching... even in the bathroom.

                The more pages I found, the more the music picked up, and the more persistent Slendy became.  His stalking became fiercer.  I would see him off in the distance watching me from a tree, and the next time I looked he would have moved even closer with inexplicable speed.  It is an unsettling feeling knowing that someone is constantly watching you.  At 6 pages, things reach a chaos.  The music is loud and feverish, and Slendy can basically teleport.  Running away is a futile attempt.  To collect the remainder of the pages, luck has to be on your side.  It is during this stretch of the game that the best jump scares occur.  The moment Slendy leaves your eyesight, he can appear anywhere.  He will be around that corner waiting for you to run into his open arms, and this is exactly what happened to me every time I played.  My heart would be beating through my chest, and Slendy would appear just around a corner and make me jump out of my seat.

He may not look like much, but he disturbs my calm.

                For the fact that the game is free, it offers a great, albeit short, time.  The graphics and things may not be the best, but the atmosphere and tension the game produces is enough to be completely unsettling.  I have never actually managed to beat the game.  Once six pages are found, the best way to keep him from teleporting is to stare him down while he is behind a tree.  He can’t move when he is still within your sight, but something about staring towards that expressionless face is hard for me to do.  Slender: The Eight Pages is a great way to spend a night scaring the pee out of yourself.  It can be found for free download here: http://www.parsecproductions.net/slender/.  I highly recommend just sitting down, killing the lights, cranking the volume, and immersing yourself in this simple, frightful gem.

                Located below is a video of someone actually beating the game.  He did what I could not, but I feel no shame.  Drop me a line in the comment section and let me know how pitiful I am for not finding all of the pages.  You won’t hurt my feelings.  

In Dead Space Everyone Can Hear You Scream

                The only sound is the clank of my character’s boots, as I guide Isaac Clarke down a dimly lit hallway of the USG Ishimura in painfully slow fashion.  My goal is a door at the end of the hallway, but the hallway is a horrifying sight.  I cannot look anywhere around me without finding blood.  Bloody hand prints and smears line all surfaces of the hallway, as though a mutilated corpse was dragged the length of the corridor.  The trail of blood continues past the door at the hallway’s end.  What kind of creature could have caused such agony? I hope it is not on the other side of the door.  As Isaac enters the door with gun raised, I force him to plod forward.  A body drops from the ceiling and the music features frantic striking of string instruments.  I let out a tiny scream in the darkness of my bedroom.  My dog gives me a quizzical look as I survey my bedroom to make sure nothing is in the room or witnessing my pitiful state.  My embarrassment forces me to finish playing for the night.  The game has beaten me again.

If you follow a trail of blood, you're going the right way.

                This is just a brief scene from the 2008 survival horror game called “Dead Space.”  In recent posts I talked about how atmosphere and sound design in a game can make or break the experience, “Dead Space” has stellar sound design to spare.  It might be the most atmospheric game I have ever experienced in my entire life, and it is most definitely one of the scariest games I have played in recent memory.  Every moment of this game is a tension filled journey of perfection.

Approaching the USG Ishimura.

                The game opens up with Isaac and his crew approaching a ship called the USG Ishimura.  The Ishimura is denoted as a “planetcracker” starship (so basically a gigantic mining facility).  In traditional horror fashion, the facility has sent out a distress signal to the Concordance Extraction Corporation during one of their mining operations on planet Aegis VII.  The CEC dispatches the USG Kellion to investigate the disturbance.  As Isaac and his crew approaches, the Ishimura is completely dark on the outside and radio contact is dead.  The guidance system of the Kellion manages to malfunction and the ship crashes into the docking bay of the mining facility.  Helplessly stranded, the crew has no choice but to seek help from whomever is on the Ishimura, but what they find is less than welcoming.

Isaac has the perfect view to watch his team die.

                It doesn’t take long for the body count to begin rising.  Within less than five minutes of being on the ship, Isaac watches as creatures drop in and kill all but two of the crew, as he accesses a security console in a different room.  The screams of his crew telling him to run spur Isaac down a hallway with one of the grotesque monsters chasing him.  After escaping into an elevator, Isaac is isolated on the giant spaceship and forced to fight on in order to discover what the hell happened to the crew of the Ishimura.

Adult finger painting?

                The game uses many clever ways of inducing fear in the player with the most prominent being the setting.  The Ishimura is a dimly lit space station with narrow, metal corridors (perfect for the loud, unsettling clanking sound of boots) and hundreds of ventilation shafts.  “This is Genson.  Everybody listen up!  They’re using the vents!  That’s how they’re getting around the ship! Stay away from the vents,” declares the first audio log I found in the game.  There are vents literally everywhere in these hallways.  I constantly heard scraping and shadows darting past the vents causing me to tread lightly and constantly check my back.  The setting is also amplified by the sound design.

I'm not sure if I can emphasize the amount of bloody death more.

That first audio log I found ended with the horrified death of the speaker as something attacked them all.  The audio logs gives you hints throughout the games but also give you bone chilling bits of voices dying during the recordings.  Add in the unnerving soundtrack that features constant grinding of string instruments and you have one of the most atmospheric sound designs that gaming has to offer.  “Dead Space” revels in building the tension with music and culminating in a monster popping out of a ventilation shaft to scare the living daylights out of you.  This method works every time.

This is the rattling sound in your vents!

I haven’t actually beaten “Dead Space” yet.  Every time I start playing the game, it seems to unsettle me too much.  The game reminds me greatly of “Aliens,” and as I child I made the poor decision of watching that movie.  Xenomorphs popping out of ventilation shafts right and left as Ripley runs for her life, the whole game just screams this kind of experience at me and that hits a little too close to home for me.  “Aliens” is the only movie that gave me nightmares growing up, and I would not be surprised if “Dead Space” also managed to do that.  This game does not feature just one moment of pants peeing; “Dead Space” features an incessant assault of undergarment wetting moments.  It is one of the best horror games in recent memory.  If you fancy peeing your pants late at night, give “Dead Space” a try.  You won’t be disappointed.

The video below is from the first part of "Dead Space."  Check it out and leave me a comment below letting me know if you think I'm a pansy.  Drop me a line on Twitter (@nevstorm5) if you like what you see on my site.  Drop me a line if you hate me; I'm not picky.  I just get lonely in the dark void of the internet.

There is a Flood Coming

                Marines are the angry guard dogs of the United States of America.  They are brutally trained and taught to carry out orders under the harshest conditions so that when we need them they can deliver with gusto.  To break a marine and have him cowering in fear should be a near impossible task.  In “Halo: Combat Evolved” you are introduced to a broken marine that brings about a surprisingly scary moment for the futuristic shooter.

One of the best shooters ever made.

                In the level 343 Guilty Spark, Master Chief is assigned the task of finding out what happened to Captain Keyes.  The Captain was investigating a covenant weapon cache he found out about earlier when he was captured, but his last transmission was over twelve hours ago.  Something gravely wrong has happened and it is up to the Chief to find Keyes and bring him home safely.

The missing captain getting his sneer on.

                As the mission opens you are greeted with a most unusual sight from the safety of a Pelican.  On the ground can be seen a large force of Covenant troops hurriedly running away from an unseen enemy.  For such a fearsome army to be running away, it leaves an ominous feeling over the mission that only continues to grow as your progress.  There are frequent times where outlines of enemies can be seen in the fog of the swamp and that red dots pop-up on your radar only to disappear a moment later.  It builds a constant sense of tension that sky rockets when you run into a marine who literally might have peed his pants.

A fly over of the eerie swamp in 343 Guilty Spark.

                When I turned a corner midway through the level I ran into an area blasted with gunfire and scorch marks.  There against a wall sat a lone marine pointing his pistol at the door. "Stay back! Stay back, you're not turning me into one of those things! I'll blow your brains out! Get away from me,” yelled the marine.  He proceeded to shoot warning shots at me while he yelled more nonsensical things my way, "Gaaaaahh! Aaaaaahh! Don't touch me, you freaks! I won't be like you, I'll die first! Find your own hiding place, the monsters are everywhere!"  This sends the ever building tension through the roof.  What the hell could this man have seen that was even more terrifying than the Covenant forces they have been fighting for years?  A few minutes later I found the answer, and it was not a good one.

The paranoid marine takes a shot at the Chief. Poor choice.

                A few hallways after the frightened marine I came upon a door that was recently opened by a UNSC spoofer ( kind of like a hacking device to open electronic doors in the game).  Just as I was about to open the door, a cutscene begins and an odd slithering kind of noise is heard behind the Chief and he turns around ready to shoot, but he sees nothing.  The Chief continues on and uses the spoofer to open the door.  When the door opens, the body of Manuel Mendoza falls into his arms.  After advancing a few paces, the Chief places Mendoza softly on the ground and scans the room.  He finds a helmet with the name “JENKINS” on it in bold letters, removes the helmet recording chip from it, and places it in his own to see what happened.

Every fiber of my being wishes Jenkins' first name was Leeroy.

A recording of Jenkins’s last mission plays.  It shows his team approaching the facility you are currently in and running across some similarly odd occurrences.  "Something...scrambled the insides,” says a marine as he examines the dead body of a Sangheili Elite.  It isn’t plasma burns or bullet holes, something else appears to have killed the Elite.  All hell breaks loose on the video after you watch them use the spoofer and enter the room the Chief currently occupies.

An oddly mutilated Elite body. "Alien" anybody?

"I've got a bad feeling about this.." says Mendoza.  “Boy, you always got a bad feelin' about something,” responds Sergeant Johnson.  A radio transmission full of static breaks up the conversation as the troops above ground report to Captain Keyes about being attacked by an unknown force.  They are being easily overrun.  At the same time as the frantic radio broadcast, the odd slithering noise that the Chief heard reappears and grows in intensity.  The marines are now on edge and the tension is hitting its peak.  Then a marine yells, "Everywhere... I don't - there! (Spanish) ¡Mira!" (Look!),” and a door explodes in front of the marines with a new alien force comes rushing in the room from all openings.  The force is called the Flood and easily overpowers all members of the team and the transmission dies.

Johnson and Keyes back to back as things get crazy.

As the Chief tosses the recording chip from his helmet, the Flood begin to poor in from all sides and the fight is on.  I regained control and began firing frantically at this new foe.  The Flood are terrifying, parasitic creatures that fight in large masses.  The main forces are comprised of tiny squid-like puff creatures that will attach on to a host and tear out their insides until they gain control of the dead body.  They take control the corpses of all fallen creatures and use them as a host.  The rest of the level is spent trying to escape from these monsters as hordes of them pour out of every crevice killing anything in their path.  It is obvious now why the marines and Covenant forces earlier were so terrified: the aptly named Flood are a force that cannot be stopped.

Jellyfish from hell.

This is how the Flood are introduced in the first Halo game and I was surprised that the game actually managed to be quite scary.  The way that the game builds the tension and intrigue around this new foe is extremely effective; when it gives you control after the cinematic it is a beautifully frantic experience that makes the Flood seem like a truly terrifying force.  I’m fairly convinced that Bungie could create a full blown horror game if they wanted to but that is beside the point.  The first appearance of the Flood is one of the greatest moments in the Halo series and I absolutely love it.
Love Halo?  Hate the Flood?  Let me know what you think in the comments section!  Also, be sure to check out the YouTube video of the paranoid marine and Jenkins cinematic below!

 

A Gamer's Worst Fear

                There are few things more irritating when playing a video game than something going completely wrong on a physical level.  Say for instance, you are in a heated battle with an enemy and your health is dwindling to dangerously low levels, when all of a sudden someone unplugs the video chord.  The dominant urge is to swear and punch this person (who has just raised his a**hole level to newfound heights) before you frantically fumble around trying to plug your system back in.  By the time that everything is back to normal, the damage has already been done.  There you lie, dead because of someone else’s ignorance.

                Moments where a gaming experience goes awry on a physical level leave the player feeling helpless.  There is nothing the player can do but watch as technology fails him.  In 2002, a game came out with this kind of chaotic manipulation in mind called “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.”  It is the first game directly published by Nintendo to earn an M rating and one of the first games to severely screw with my mind.

The game's cover.

                “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem” is a game that takes place from 25 BC all the way to 2000 AD.  The game revolves around Alexandra Roivas who, while investigating the mysterious murder of her grandfather, comes across a tome bound with human skin and bone in her grandfather’s mansion.  The book is called The Tome of Eternal Darkness (don’t you love when the title of games pops up in the game) and when she reads it she experiences a scene in the life of Pious Augustus, a respected Roman Centurion in 26 BC.  Augustus is trying to summon one of three Ancients, powerful godlike beings, into this reality while a fourth ancient named Mantorok tries to stop this from happening.  If this summoning is accomplished, the Ancient would feast on the souls of all living beings and cast the universe into the horror of eternal darkness.

Alexandra hates when godlike beings threaten humanity.

                Seeing as how a godlike being eating all living souls might cause some discomfort for her future plans, Alexandra decides to find the missing chapters of the tome scattered throughout the mansion.  Each chapter that she finds causes her to relive the experiences of individuals who either crossed paths with Pious or other servants of the ancients over the centuries.  During the course of the game you control twelve different characters that each brings something vitally important to the overall plot.  While the story and settings of the game are creepy enough by themselves, it is the gameplay, specifically the sanity meter, which makes the game really stand out and drive the player insane.

Just finishing a monster so as to not go insane. No big deal.

                The sanity meter is a wonderfully Nintendo patented idea that is represented by an on screen green bar that can be depleted under various conditions, like being seen by an enemy.  The trick is to keep this bar from dropping by doing things like not being noticed or killing enemies with a finishing move, because when the bar becomes low enough various mind-bending effects begin to occur. The screaming voices of women and children begin to be heard, walls begin to bleed, the heads of statues will follow your characters movements, and so on, but the worst effects are those that seem to interact with the physical world.  Sometimes the game’s audio will mute or slowly drop in increments while other times the TV will appear to shut off or change video modes.  The game begins to make the player think that he is actually going insane.  It’s a terrifying effect that can affect your actual sanity without prior knowledge.  The most terrifying of these effects is one that had me praying that the game was lying to me.

One sanity effect kicks you back to the start screen bearing this quote.

                Saving your game is a natural thing in video games.  One needs to log his progress in order to continue at a later time.  It is common sense. “Eternal Darkness” attacked this vital gaming pillar during my playthrough and it shattered me for a moment.  Once, when my sanity meter was low, I saved my game.  After a successful save, I was greeted with this message, “Delete All Saved Games? Are you sure you want to delete all of your Saved Games? (Note: All of your progress so far will be lost!).” The game gave me options of “Yes” and “Continue Without Saving.”  I was drastically confused by what the screen was telling me so I quickly chose the latter.  I proceeded to watch in horror as the game disregarded my choice and showed a progress bar titled “Deleting” pop up on screen.  That little yellow progress bar was the worst thing I had ever seen.  I watched as hours of progress slipped away down the drain and for a brief moment my mind was fried.  When a message stating, “You have successfully Deleted all of your Saved Games,” appeared, I dropped my controller in disbelief.  Did that really just happen?  Seconds later, the game screamed, “This isn’t really happening,” in a struggling tone and life rushed back to my brain.

One of gaming's greatest what the hell moments.

                “Eternal Darkness” had just pulled the biggest a**hole move in gaming history.  The game actually made me believe it had deleted all of my progress for one brief moment.  In that single second, it made every gamer live their worst nightmare: that their gaming technology at one point might be corrupted or fail them.  It is a gaming moment that I will never forget.  The game broke me for just a second, but that second was one of the scariest moments of gaming I have ever experienced.

                Did you have a similar experience with “Eternal Darkness” or maybe you think I’m just being a baby.  If so, sound off in the comments section or follow me on Twitter (@nevstorm5) and give me a shout out.  Be sure to check out some of the sanity effects in the video below.  Until the next time, folks!