Slender Man has captured a large part of the popular psyche--large enough that two girls stabbed a third girl 19 times, and other children commit acts of arson, all in his name. I can't help but blend those headlines with subsequent forays into the Slender Man mythos. Although he is without a doubt fictitious--a legend manufactured wholecloth in full view of the internet's many denizens--he's transcended himself. He's now a self-reinforcing curiosity of the modern era, reflecting the deep-seated fears of our connected culture.
For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, Slendy, as some affectionately call him, was born on the internet forums of the 21st century. A few Photoshop projects featured a thin, suited figure without an apparent face. The first few images of him depicted children running away--and right there, we have the seeds for a great ghost story. He is the embodiment of the unknown, and he preys on the weakest among us--children. From that point on, he became a meme in the truest sense of the word, evolving and changing to suit whatever the population thought would yield the most easily shared terror.
Slender Man is now a self-reinforcing curiosity of the modern era, reflecting the deep-seated fears of our connected culture.
So how does he terrorize us now? When he approaches, he causes electronics, particularly cameras, to malfunction and glitch out. He causes his victims to go mad. He's most aggressive when you're trying to look straight at him. Perhaps most tellingly, he tends to stick to rural areas.
Again, all this is purely fictitious, but it's interesting that so many of these individual threads converged into a single vision coherent enough to yield a substantive game in Slender: The Arrival. This coalescence of traits creates a compelling antagonist that preys on the modern. In our metropolitan world of smartphone cameras and nearly ubiquitous connections, a mysterious figure that resists investigation and cuts us off from our technological safety net is the ultimate terror.
Arrival benefits from these fears and pulls every psychological string. However, that's all it can do. From a play perspective, it's about as minimal as they come. You can pick up pages and notes strewn about the various levels; after the preface, you can pick up a simple flashlight. That lack of agency is powerful, though. From its nascent stages, it's clear that you're struggling to survive in the shadow of beings that sap all hope. Slender Man and his several proxies--corrupted and insane people he's brought under his influence--are cold and uncaring. They have no clear motive other than your defilement, and they are omnipotent. Slender Man, for example, can teleport, and there's nothing you can do to defend yourself from his tentacle-y arms but turn and run away. It's an impressive foundation, and it fills me with dread to this day.
Slender Man and his several proxies are cold and uncaring. They have no clear motive other than your defilement, and they are omnipotent.
I've played Slender and its expanded pseudo-sequel Arrival before, but when I ran through it again, that prior experience didn't help ease my fears. The world is cloaked in darkness, and all you have to push away a small sliver of that enveloping black is a small, barely functional flashlight. Against the dark, Slender Man's blank, white visage creates an arresting contrast every time he appears. The system creates procedurally generated jump scares using a weighty, pervasive atmosphere of vulnerability and helplessness. The same system went on to birth the popular Five Nights at Freddy's series.
Player death in Arrival takes on a whole new meaning without the predictability of those frights. I found myself afraid of being afraid, eager to see the game end so I could at last take a breath, relieved to be safe once again.
That near-constant level of stress would doom a longer game, but Arrival clocks in at just two hours. The console versions add a few extra levels that weren't present in the original PC release, and they pad out the tension with just a bit of calm to keep players from growing exhausted. On the flip side, the added sections dilute Arrival's already-tight focus. In its original incarnation, Arrival was an agonizing, frantic mystery. You stepped into the body of Lauren, a woman desperate to find any clues regarding the disappearance of her friend Kate. As you poked about Kate's house, you could gathered snippets of information suggesting that her mother had passed away and that her family had been facing financial trouble--leaving the possibility open for suicide. The more you learned, though, the grimmer the reality became.
The added sections dilute Arrival's already-tight focus.
A few side characters were present that were hinted to be the Slender Man. Because just moving around in any given level could prompt the appearance of the Slender Man, you always felt that the answers were out there, but you could never quite piece it all together. With the new areas, some of that mystery is gone, and Slender Man is established as some otherworldly being. That spoils a bit of the fun and raises plenty of questions about why Slender now attacks people, where he was before, how he came to be, etc. Without a plausible in-universe explanation, he loses just a bit of his mystique.
Despite that, Slender: The Arrival still got under my skin. I'm not quite as warm to it as I was before, but it's an eerie experience that's seeped into my real life. Now, on long car rides or when I'm in a sparsely populated area in the dead of night, I'll catch glints of light and my heart will stutter at the thought that Slender Man could be at the edge of my periphery. All I can do is turn away and keep walking.
Unlike the superheroes of comic books, Infinite Crisis makes no effort to hide its true identity. It is, through and through, a clear play for the lucrative MOBA market featuring familiar DC Universe characters as playable champions. While no one can fault Warner Brothers for wanting its franchise to be represented among the ever-growing population of MOBAs, you might have expected to see more effort to mask the face of gameplay we've seen regurgitated over the past few years.
Infinite Crisis follows a formula similar to most of the DotA and League of Legends knock-offs that have sprung up over the years. Each team has a nexus--er, power core--connected by lanes to the enemy's power core. Those lanes have towers that need to be destroyed so you can reach the enemy's core. Your champion starts out at level one and levels up by defeating wave after wave of minions--er, drones--and unlocking access to more powerful abilities and items that will help you combat the enemy champions.
Attempting to kill the Raider alone may attract enemy heroes.
If you only play the standard maps in DotA and League of Legends, you will find Infinite Crisis' default map a bit different from what you're familiar with due to the objectives beyond defeating towers and neutral monsters. At a certain point, power relays unlock that players capture by standing on them. Controlling two of the three relays enables stronger drones for your top lane, while controlling all three powers the drones in both lanes. The inhibitor/rax interaction of other games is completely absent in lieu of this territorial control element. The extra level of strategy involved in controlling the relays greatly affects gameplay: Getting your teammates to help you force away the lone enemy jungler trying to capture his own territory can mean a huge swing in power early on in the game and catalyze a wave of momentum leading to victory.
Although the majority of combat is intended to take place in the lanes, I found myself to be much more effective in the game's poorly-tuned Urban Jungle, where it is far too easy to get massive leads in credits (gold) over other players. It isn't clear at the outset, but the two camps near the center of the Coast City yield far more experience and credits without much more risk--controlling those two camps alone can slingshot you ahead of allies and enemies alike that stick to farming the lanes instead. As long as the game isn't particularly bloody, your jungler can find herself thousands of credits ahead of everyone else in the game, even without interacting with other players. This discrepancy in the expected balance sticks out like a sore thumb, and in my own play time, I was able to abuse that feature to drastic effect.
Need a break from lane? Take down the Urban Jungle!
Infinite Crisis does have its own carbon copy of the DotA/LoL map along with a few others, but matchmaking queues for all of these are disabled due to population concerns, thus ensuring that everyone is funneled into the Coast City queue for fast matchmaking times. If you wish to play the other variants, you must have friends willing to join you in the custom lobbies. The queues for these maps could return in the near future if the game's population rises again, but in the interim, it's frustrating to see player choice diminished by players abandoning the DC Multiverse.
Champion design in Infinite Crisis is overtly familiar, with some skills being almost direct ports of their League of Legends counterparts, though no kit feels like a direct rip-off. The game does a good job of making each champion's skill set make sense for that superhero--even the alternate universe versions of those heroes. The Flash is overloaded with mobility, as one would expect from the Fastest Man Alive. Green Lantern comes with massive magical nuke powers thanks to his ring. The Joker's play style can be summarized with the word "trickster." IC even brings out Superman's trusty canine, Krypto, whose entire gameplay kit revolves around him fetching a bone to empower his support abilities. Infinite Crisis also enlists the alternate Earths of Arcane, Atomic, Gaslight, Mecha, and Nightmare for champion designs. Gaslight's steampunkish designs and Nightmare's monsters both managed to output my favorite characters.
Checkboxes help to sort the shop for faster navigation.
Infinite Crisis' main problem is that it lacks snappiness. It's hard to get a good grasp on just how much damage you're going to do, even after practice with certain champions. Playing Gaslight Catwoman, I only knew my assassination attempts would succeed if I engaged with someone low on health or massively overextended. If the target were at full health, it was a coin toss whether I would get the kill I was going for. This problem is exacerbated by underwhelming visual effects that don't deliver the justice one would expect from a clash between superheroes. Apart from a few exceptions, such as the Green Lantern incarnations' ring manifestations, the game's spell effects don't pop from the screen and encourage engagement in combat. The visuals fail to evoke excitement; Much like the drone minions, interacting with Infinite Crisis feels robotic and mechanical, turning the combat into the game's biggest drone.
Another setback is the user interface. The main menu features an imbalanced presentation of relevant information versus auxiliary information. Achievement progress takes up nearly a quarter of the screen, while the game's shop, where players can unlock champions, skins, and stolen powers, is tucked away in the right-hand corner. Once in-game, the item shop is no easier to manage. Granted, the recommended item builds are easy to use (the game includes a button to auto-buy the next recommended item any time you can afford it and are near the shop), but the full list of items is displayed as icons, with no names showing unless you hover over the icons. You can sort items by what stats they give, but hunting down a specific item's passive effect gets tedious and slows down your gameplay. Learning how to use the item shop made me feel like I was memorizing vocabulary for third grade all over again, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Controlling power relays can turn the tide of battle.
By design, items also have their own problems; because Infinite Crisis doesn't include any component items and each item must be upgraded from its base form to its final form to unlock its passive effect, changing your item builds midgame to accommodate your team's needs or adjust for any new situations is much less efficient than it is in similar games. Items don't have branching upgrade paths, so once you've started an item, you're stuck with that path unless you sell it or start a new item.
The game is friendlier for newer players than some of its in-genre siblings, however. While League of Legends keeps rune slots locked until certain account levels, Infinite Crisis gives characters completed Augment/Mod kits they can use even at level 1. Players can purchase augments and mods to customize a character to their liking, but no player is at an outright disadvantage simply for being at a lower level. In this sense, Infinite Crisis improves upon existing MOBA conventions. Unfortunately, the game otherwise lacks the Old English finish it so sorely needed; Where's Alfred when you need him?
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