I dare you to play Slender

Last weekend in between Dota 2 matches, I've been playing what people consider the game to play if you want to shit your pants. It's not a flash game that provides those cheap scares forcing you to look close, this is an actual game that will only take you a couple of minutes to go through. That is, if you can get to the end.

Slender is plain and simple. You are in a forest at night equipped with a flashlight, and tasked to pick up eight pages before the "Slender Man" gets you. Simple right? Well that's what I thought. Not sure where Slender Man started exactly but this scary entity is a very tall and skinny man with very long arms. Slender man's face is purely white with no eyes, mouth, or even hair, just a white head like close to a manikin.

Creepy I know, but that's not why Slender freaked the hell out of me. It's the scenario that the game puts you in that makes Slender a very scary game. You are alone, not a single light in the forest but your flashlight, and all you can do is look for these pages that relate to the Slender Man. When you pick up your first page, that's when the Slender Man starts going for you. Each time you pick up more pages, the Slender Man gets closer and closer. At the start he just stands there for you to find him, around 5 up, he starts creeping behind you.

The sounds in this game delivers the fear perfectly. You hear this weird sound as if someone is walking towards you. When The Slender Man gets near your screen slowly starts developing static. When The Slender Man touches you it's game over. The screen goes complete static and you see Slender Man's face on your screen and the game literally just exits. It's such a simple game but it delivers the true fear so well that while I write this, I tend to look at my shoulder like a 7-year-old scared of the boogeyman, or maybe because I played it a couple of hours ago and the effect is still around. I haven't played a game that could deliver a feeling like this in a long time. My highest so far is reaching page 5. It's a bit hard for me to keep going after each session because the game gets to me. It made me jumpy through the night. It was great. A lasting appeal from a scary game that only took a couple of minutes to experience.

People say PewDiePew from Youtube started the Slender trend. If you search in Google or even in Youtube itself, you will find tons of gamers making Lets Play Slender videos. Here's one playthrough of PewDiePew playing Slender. Hilarious stuff by the way.

I wasn't screaming like that, a bit exaggerated if you ask me, but one of my encounters with the Slender Man did make me take out my headphones as fast as possible to the ground. Oh, did I mention that you have to conserve your flashlight's battery?

It gets  crazy fast when you start racking up the pages. You start walking faster because you know he's behind you. You have no defense against him, and the idea that he could appear anywhere got me looking everywhere. To make matters worse, I sometimes mistake the tree having The Slender man behind it, peeping at you with half his body revealed. Getting freaked out by that makes me look away fast , and to find he was behind me all along. My mind starts to play tricks on me. It's definitely one of the scariest games out in this generation.

It's Free to give you a heart attack

It's free. This short but terrifying adventure is easy to get. If you want to give it a go, you can head over to the site and start downloading. It's only 58MB big and is definitely not graphics heavy so you don't have to worry about that.

Turn down the lights, wear headphones, and start searching for those damn pages. Try to beat my 5 page score. Reaching five isn't so hard. It's after five where he starts showing up all over the place.