Against your better instincts, you trip down the staircase, obeying the game's monolithic, unsympathetic instruction to Investigate scream beyond the back gate. There might be any number of legitimate reasons for a house to be deserted, but there's usually only one reason a woman shrieks in the countryside at night. Now concern contorts into anxiety as the implicit is made audibly explicit.
The windows are open, the TV emits a threatening buzz of static: oh no, where is she? Just as you locate a torch on the dining room table amongst the other domestic debris, a scream streaks in from the back yard. By the time you make it to the front door the light has entirely failed, the darkness surged through the leaf canopy, up and up, to form a unanimous night.Īngst turns to concern when you find the house open, but haggardly deserted. It rises, up from the brush, in great billowing shadows. As any walker knows, night doesn't fall in a forest. It arrives after you leave the muffled safety of your Jeep and twist through the trees towards an old friend's mansion for a reunion. Slender: The Arrival is a work of horror, but 'horror' doesn't come close to covering the emotional journey involved.