The only good thing about Be the Slender Man is it only takes a few minutes to play, and frankly, it’s a few minutes too many.
The quality of this game is evident from the start. The text also has basic grammar mistakes about every other line.
The plot is that your son says some kid took his pictures. So you go find slenderman fanart by finding kids who seem to have just stumbled on the pictures, and killing most of them for it.
The game is set up so you’re supposed to go into the house next to yours immediately, but nothing actually makes you do so, so it’s easy to break sequence. The “gameplay” itself is simply to walk up to kids, at which point you talk to them and then autokill them, or talk to them and don’t autokill them, or you can’t talk to them because you’re supposed to talk to somebody else to explain why you shouldn’t autokill them.
I have no idea why this is recommended by anyone. It’s not even bad enough to make sense as ironically terrible. It’s just lazy crap with the single gimmick of WHAT IF YOU WERE POPULAR MONSTER WOULDN’T THAT BE HILARIOUS?
So I’ll send you on your way advising you to check out another infinitely better horror game, Composition 83. It’s extremely short and quite clever. Play it yourself if you like, or watch this Let’s Play.
Does this mean you already played or watched someone else play Slender?
Nope! That’s on the list of things to inflict on myself, though.
Okay…I don’t understand what happened at all in the LP. What exactly happened? Why did it cut off? Did the guy die? And why are the people all petrified? There is absolutely no closure here. :/
Yes.
But, what happens if you actually try and touch the people in Composition 83? (I don’t want to try it.)
Nothing. You also can’t fall from the path. I tried both.
It was actually funny to jump on those black figures since, given their poses, it felt like they were aware of me and tried to get away. Also, I could almost reach the figure in the air.
Actually I just forgot to turn off the jumping before the release.
As for “don’t touch them” warning – it is a recurring joke between operator and a diver, reminiscing the times when diving suits were not so safe and touch people was extremely dangerous.
You are the developer, then?
I would say I enjoyed the game, it did succeed in establishing the atmosphere and presenting the player with a picture that almost, but not quite makes sense, which is a good type of horror.
However, I think the warning about the worm doesn’t quite work: there is not enough information to get that it’s a joke, and when you take it at face value, the lack of anything happening when you accidentally brush on the frozen people (or, in my case, jump all over them) is rather disappointing.
Same with the inability to fall from the path, the invisible walls kinda took me away from the game.
The first time I’ve played the game I was taking the warning seriously and though I can fall with a wrong step. Which prompted me to search a path around people without straying to close to the edge of the ground. That was a pretty tense experience, which is why finding out that I didn’t need to worry about it is rather disappointing.
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate that.
I planned this game as non-challenging, so there are no actual hazards that can interrupt the game – only in the ending.
“The first time I’ve played the game I was taking the warning seriously
and though I can fall with a wrong step. Which prompted me to search a
path around people without straying to close to the edge of the ground.” – though it wasn’t my goal, I think it’s an interesting idea. Too bad I haven’t think about this by myself.
Oh hey!
I think it’d have been clearer it was a joke if the diver reacted to it. It’s such a freaky and surreal thing I just assumed that touching them was a horrible idea and maybe that sort of infection was what was getting the diver at the end.
But while you’re here, what’s been bugging me is – going by the symbols around dialogue, the bit at the end is just the operator talking, but it’s talking about butterflies in the diving suit?
Hi!
In this tandem only the Operator is the talkative, and only him is in mood to joke. Diver’s “Maybe that’s me” is not a joke at all.
In the end it’s the other divers talking (the ones that stands still), player character hears them before his inevitable doom.
Oooh, that makes sense now. So the ** just means any message coming into the suit rather than being said by the diver. That’s super creepy.
About the joke, maybe if the diver just said something along the lines of “Don’t joke” in response? That’d also cement that the diver’s not joking when he sees the frozen diver (athough I didn’t take it as a joke then either way).