What I can disagree with you on factually, is Slender. The game is cheap. It focuses on cheap scares, cheap pursuit tactics, and just overall cheap atmosphere.
I disagree with you that the scares are "cheap". Truly cheap scares are ones that come out of bloody nowhere and launch at the screen without adequate buildup. Meanwhile, Slender's jump scares follow a simple ruleset: If the monster gets too close, you get a burst of harsh static. While it's not particularly refined, it DOES have a reason and conveys a message to the player (get moving!), so it avoids being cheap.
Also, atmosphere does more or less nothing for me in terms of actually scaring me, so it's pretty irrelevant to me. After all, I wasn't freaked out by Silent Hill 2, the "master of atmosphere", soooo...
Forests? The Blair Witch Project called.
So it did.
...what about it? Are we not allowed to use setpieces more than once in entertainment? Silent Hills 2 and on are going to be pretty sad about this news.
Not to mention that the game breaks one of the most basic rules of horror. Try not to show your monster. Keep it in the shadows. That's how you establish a pursuit mentality. The on/off idea of chasing. It may be there, it may be not. It may be safe to turn around, and it may not be. In Slender, you're pretty bloody aware that there's a tentacle thing behind you and it's looking to kill you.
Have you actually played it? You're only aware that it's behind you if there's static going, but just because there's no static doesn't mean it's not there. You're entirely wrong on this point.
Also, if you're getting good looks at the slenderman, you're playing it wrong. Some games obscure the monster by hiding it in shadows, while Slender hides the monster by making prolonged looks at it fatal. This assumes you can see it, because it's often well obscured by the trees. Amnesia made the same thing happen, if I recall, except prolonged looks made your sanity go down rather than killing you. And if you want to see the monster in good light, there's really nothing stopping you from walking over and getting killed. Plus, in Amnesia, you bloody well knew there was a monster chasing you because of that music. If there was no music, that didn't really tell you much about what was behind you.
...What I'm saying is is that your critiques of Slender happen to apply nicely to Amnesia, one of the most celebrated horror games of all time that is constantly praised for "hiding its monsters".
And yes, I am thoroughly aware that horror is a genre steeped in anticipation, but this is the wrong kind of anticipation. Anticipation of the horror variety is supposed to keep you on edge, to keep you involved in the plot, to keep you guessing. Slender does virtually none of that.
No... that's thriller anticipation. Good try.
Horror anticipation is much simpler, it's all about whether or not you'll survive the next encounter. And while many good horror games use a combination of the two, Slender is probably the BEST example of the pure "will I survive" anticipation, because there's no guarantee that you will, especially towards the end.
Also, how exactly does Slender as a character fit the bill of body horror? I mean, there's noting particularly unsettling about him. Nothing gory or shocking. He's might as well be LeBron James wearing a Doc-Ock costume.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u46/faceless_person.jpg
Do you not find this unsettling? I find this as unsettling as hell. It's the same type of body horror that I really appreciated in Silent Hill: The models themselves weren't all that gory for the most part (Resident Evil and Parasite Eve beat them hands down), it was the features they had removed, added and changed that made them creepy.
Hell, the most celebrated Silent Hill monster, the Silent Hill 2 nurses, were positively pleasant to look at below the neck, and above the neck was mostly featureless. Are you going to tell me that the most popular Silent Freaking Hill monster has no body horror involved because you dislike Slender?
Slender is youtube bait, and a classic example of it. From what I've played of it, it felt like a cheap game that had zero effort put into it and was aiming to exploit the Slender craze of the moment, which it did brilliantly.
It's cheap, yes, but it's damn effective. The reason it's popular on Youtube is because it scares people. You know... that thing that horror games are supposed to do in the end?
Slender is scary only if you're frightened of your own shadow and/or desperately inexperienced in real horror. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I am an arsehole, and I wear that banner with at least a certain dose of pride.
