Sunday 12 August 2012

A review of Slender:


Are horror games getting more or less horrific?

With the rise of a plethora of big-name horror based games, and game-series; released for the PS2, original X-box, and even the Dreamcast; it looked like horror, and survival horror in particular, was a genre that was here to stay by the 32/64Bit era.

Then something happen.

I'm not entirely sure what, why, or when but the (planning and resource based) Survival-Horror game suddenly seemed to die out.

By the time Resident Evil 4 came out it seemed to popularise the notion of far more action based 'horror' games, and the RE series never returned to it's roots after this, apparently, despite recent proclamations to the contrary. Not that I'm blaming RE4 for this demise, but in the current climate most commercial horror games are taking the RE4 action based route, and not necessary basing their new games around the purer 'horror' aspects that a lot of the older games did.  Some of the independents, on the other hand, seem determined to get right to the beating heart of what makes a horror game. And Slender is one of those games gaining a reputation in the scare stakes...