The roots of horror excellence

It's one of the things we completely lost lately. It is that feeling that might have decided the console war between Saturn and PsOne. It is one of the things that makes games look like art, and art like games. It is the primordial need of fun and fear, it is what action daily tries to neutralize, and sometimes impinges upon.

What if I told you that a game with no ending, no social, no artistic direction, no weapons might be the best of the year? The peak of this gaming span?

In Slender you're a person lost in the woods, in the dark. Equipped with a flashlight, you wander with the task of finding 8 different papers. On the first you read "NO NO NO NO" and see a drawing representing a man with long limbs and a pale face. On the second "Face, No eye". Once I picked it up, my game ended, the Slender man was inches away, facing me, making my vision blur over a broken television effect, getting closer until the game quit and came back to Windows.
That was my last game, I'll never launch it again. Every deep enough person should do the same. Slender gets easily under your skin, uses your deeper feelings of loneliness, fear and curiosity to shake your perception of what is playable or not.

Analyzing Slender is easier than playing it. Game play is shaped in a way that your enemy will never appear if you don't turn around, so you may just keep going one way, touring the structures you find in the forest in search of the papers, and get away with it. You're not going to do that, even if you knew about this feature. The environment reacts to your success, adding noise every paper you get (as I verified on Youtube). Steps and wind sum up to an incredibly growing feeling that you are going to get caught. Slender is implacable, there is no way to harm him, no way of freeing the woods of his presence.

In a similar fashion to what Silent Hill did with its first three releases, Slender convinces you that there is no way out of your nightmares, and when your feelings are compromised, you have no chance of getting rid of loneliness and the absence of hope, your mistakes or the weights others release on you are not possible to overtake. You are haunted by the slender man, you are alone, you have no hope. You turn around, you die, you go back to Windows. When you finished the first Silent Hill, were you sure that there were going to be happy moments for you and your daughter? When you finished the first Resident Evil, did you really think it was the last tyrant you'll ever face or that humanity still stood a chance?

Speaking about Slender, the game, it is fair to notice how it perfectly fits in this generation. It is both an elementary game like Dear Esther or Journey before it, and a perfectly crafted horror game like Silent Hill was. It rides both waves. Representing this intersection, it sounds obvious that a game with no ending, no weapons, no tactics, no online features, no plot twists will be, by some fair reviewers, labelled as a masterpiece. Because it stands where we needed someone to step up. It might just be the most important game of this year.