Slender TEP: Playing to Win

Alternate title: "Slender: Procedurally Generated Jump Scares"

A little while ago I did a blog on playing to win at Cards Against Humanity – the idea being to apply Team Liquid's mega-competitive attitudes to things that clearly don't warrant it. Cards Against Humanity is a casual, friendly party game, so it seemed like a good place to start.

This time around I thought I'd talk about Slender: The Eight Pages, a free game by Parsec Productions that made the rounds among let's players a little while back (you may remember Day[9]'s playthrough last Halloween). Parsec's goal was to capture the experience of running from Slenderman through the woods in a video game. Of course, it's much more interesting to be running with some goal in mind, rather than just running to stay alive, so the "win" condition is to collect eight pages that are placed on various landmarks in the woods. Collect all eight and you "win" (although you're still stuck in a forest with Slenderman, so I wouldn't call it much of a win).

To be clear, the proper way to play this game is to get in a room with a bunch of your friends, hook up your computer so it outputs video to a TV, and take turns forfeiting your sanity to Slenderman. Or to sit in your room by yourself with headphones in, lights off, and door unlocked and scare yourself silly. For these purposes you don't necessarily want to be good at the game; in fact, it probably helps for a fun evening if you have a basic idea of wasd controls, but otherwise know nothing about the game. One friend of mine refuses to look up things like a game map or exact descriptions of how Slenderman moves, in much the same way that other people avoid spoilers to games, movies, or GSL matches. I'm not going to put anything in spoiler tags, so if you don't want Slender TEP spoiled, read no further!

Good, now those whiners are gone. Because playing Slender with your friends and dying is all well and good, but some of us can't stand seeing a win condition without trying our best to achieve it. And Slender TEP exhibits a characteristic known to game design theorists as being balls hard, so you have to know what you're up against.

The Rules
I can give some idea HOW Slenderman murders you, but I honestly don't know about the why.

Slenderman
Slenderman is an entity in the game that teleports every tick of some internal clock (I believe at the beginning the ticks are two or three seconds apart). If there's no line of sight between you and him when the tick comes, he teleports randomly within some radius of you, but doesn't teleport somewhere within your vision. if he has line of sight on you but you're not looking at him, he teleports straight towards you. If he has line of sight on you but you're looking at him, the clock stops ticking and he stays where he is. But whenever Slenderman is on screen, you start seeing static (indicating your character is losing health), so forcing him to hold position by staring him down isn't going to be a winning strat.

As the game proceeds, Slenderman gets more aggressive. That means several things: 1) the radius around you in which he teleports will shrink. 2) the time between ticks will decrease. I have heard it rumored that after page 6 Slenderman appears right behind you automatically, but in at least one Let's Play I've seen someone collect the bathroom note as page six and still be alright, so I don't think that's accurate. I've also heard rumored that the restriction on teleporting into your line of sight is removed after page 6, but I'm not sure if that one's true either.

That means there are several stages of Slenderman behavior, and the game's internal logic has conditions which, when satisfied, make Slenderman hate you more. As best I can tell, it steps it up whenever you pick up a page. But if you wait too long to pick up the next page (about four minutes), it escalates things as well. Because it steps up the ambient sound effects every other difficulty level, you can usually tell that it's stepping things up.

The Pages

Thanks to your friendly neighborhood Shank, whoever that is.

There are ten locations where pages can be. There will only be pages at eight of them. The pages are white, frequently against a dark background, but they're not shining or flashing or spinning like a lot of games' collectable items are, so they can be a bit tough to spot. Probably the easiest aspect to spot is the aliasing a page does as you move around; the edges of the page are white and they'll kind of freak out and stairstep a bit as you move around.

The game made the decision to avoid having any kind of crosshair indicator, which certainly adds to the ambient effect, but does also make clicking on the page a bit difficult. Try to get a sense for where the center of your screen is (using q and e to zoom can help) if you're having trouble picking the page up; it's left click to pick up, but in a couple let's plays I've seen the player becomes convinced it isn't left click because they weren't quite centered on the page so left click didn't work.

With the rules covered, it's time to move on to some strategy:

Where is Slenderman?
Usually I'd rather not know the answer to this question, but for the purposes of winning it's necessary to figure it out.

Consider the rules we established earlier for how Slenderman moves: randomly teleports to somewhere within some radius of you but out of sight.He then repeats if he doesn't have line of sight, or teleports closer and closer once he establishes line of sight until you break it. That means we can draw a rough approximation of where he'll appear in some situations:

This is clearly what Microsoft Excel was designed for.

Here we have a drawing of the places Slenderman can spawn while you are roughing it straight through the trees. Basically, there are three places Slenderman can spawn: behind you, where he might have line of sight for a bit and follow you, but you'll probably break line of sight with a tree; to the side of you, where you will also probably break line of sight at some point, or in front of you, where you're likely to walk around a tree and encounter him.

Now consider if you stick to the path, instead of roughing it through the woods:

Now there's pretty much two places he can spawn: behind you, where he will immediately switch to teleporting closer and closer; and to the side of you, where you'll probably break line of sight with a tree. In front of you is off-limits, because he doesn't teleport into your line of sight. That means pretty soon he'll get line of sight behind you, and start following you until you round a corner.

So basically Slenderman is in one of three categories at any given time, which I affectionately term the hiding Slendy, the trailing Slendy, and the discovered Slendy.

Hiding Slendy
This is when Slenderman is somewhere behind an obstacle. You can't see him, he can't see you, and for all the world it's like you're alone in the woods with some lovely artwork taped to things. Of course, a hiding slendy is always teleporting around, so it could teleport to a spot where he can see you, but you can't see him. Then he would become a...

Trailing Slendy
A trailing Slendy has spotted you and is teleporting closer to you all the time. On the first few pages he doesn't move all that fast, and the spawning radius is large so he's probably still far away. That means you don't need to worry TOO much about a trailing slendy while you're on the first few pages; but later on a trailing slendy is dangerous business. If you break line of sight with him, then he'll return to being a hiding Slendy. But hiding slendy's are dangerous too, because they can turn into a...

Discovered Slendy
Slenderman was hiding and everything was well and good until you rounded a corner and found a discovered slendy. Or else he was just a trailing slendy until you turned around. If you were playing Pokemon Snap, this would be very good news, but as it is, you're in big trouble and need to do something about it. The discovered slendy doesn't move; he just sits there and statics up your screen as you shriek at the horrifying sight of his tentacles.

I can actually put the three kinds of Slendermen into a flow chart, as seen here:

I call it the Slender Cycle.

The scariest part of all this is that the one you MOST want to avoid is the discovered Slendy; but that's the only one where you know for sure where Slenderman is. A hiding Slendy could be anywhere, and a trailing Slendy is behind you, but you shouldn't turn around because if he isn't there, he could be in front of you when you turn back around. But now that we know how Slenderman behaves, we can attempt to control his behavior to our advantage.

Controlling the Slenderman
Truly, a terrifying prospect.

You're not just in these woods for a pleasure stroll. You've got pages to collect, and you would have done it already if it weren't for that meddling Slenderman! If this were just a game of survive-as-long-as-you-can, you could probably keep it up a very long time. But whenever you try to go somewhere in particular, you find a Slenderman in your way and you're forced to run – maybe even setting out into the trees, away from the path. So what we would like to do is choose a path on the Slendermap, and keep Slenderman either hidden or behind us, so we can continue on the path we have chosen safely. Any time Slenderman appears in front of us we have to turn around, messing up our gameplan and delaying our collection of pages.

Consider the diagrams of slendy spawns above. In a space with lots of obstacles, Slenderman is usually a hiding Slendy, but the risk of a discovered Slendy is relatively high. In a big, open space, Slenderman is usually a trailing Slendy, and the only way for a discovered Slendy to occur is for you to turn around. So if we just want to prevent any discovered Slendy's from occurring, we should stick to open spaces.

That means – and I can't stress this enough – keep moving. At all times. If you're doing it right, you should be moving along at a steady pace, sticking to the middle of the path, and hugging outside edges when you round corners. That way Slenderman never breaks line of sight, and you can live free of fear. But if you slow down, he'll catch up and you'll be forced to duck behind something to escape, in which case discovered Slendies are back on the table. Of course, when you round corners in the path you easily might break line of sight, but as long as you keep trudging along he'll just become a hiding Slendy until he teleports somewhere behind you again.

Then the only hard part is when you get to the landmarks themselves and you're forced to round some corners. In fact, I'll go ahead and list the landmarks in a rough order of decreasing scariness (based on the likelihood that you'll have a discovered Slendy while looking for the note):

1) Bathrooms
2) Rusted Tankers
3) Cross walls
4) Large rocks
5) Cutted Woods
6) Two vehicles
7) Tunnel
8) Single tanker
9) Silo
10) Scary Tree

This is useful because you can go to the scariest ones first, then do the easier ones when you're later in the game and it's harder to stay alive. Even if it weren't for the scaling difficulty of the game, it makes sense to take the biggest chances earlier in a playthrough, when you haven't invested as much time in this particular attempt.

Of course, this is fairly intuitive: go to the bathroom first, tankers second, and then head out to the cross walls and start making a circle around the map. In fact, a lot of the conclusions reached about this game so far could be boiled down to pieces of wisdom so simple that they ought to be written on the pages themselves:

      -Don't look back.

      -Keep moving.

      -Stick to the path.

      -Get the bathroom page first.

      -If you see Slenderman, hide behind something.

      -Conserve flashlight power.

      -Once you collect page 6, sprint.

      -Use a map.

Advanced Gameplans
Well, not all that advanced.

On your first few pages, you've got some extra time before you have to collect them. So you might consider something like:

1) First thing you do, run to the rusted tankers. Figure out where the note is, if there is one, but do not take it.
2) Head to the bathroom, and take a note there if there is one.
3) Cut back across the rusted tankers to the path behind, and head for the large rocks. Then turn left and head to the cross wall. Continue along the path in a counter-clockwise fashion, collecting pages.

Your final three pages are the Scary Tree, the Silo, and the Rusted tankers – but the rusted tankers will be significantly easier because you know which one has a page.

Or, alternately:

1) Head straight to the bathroom. Check where the note is, if there is one, but do not collect it.
2) Go collect the note on the rusted tankers, if there is one.
3) Like in the previous gameplan, go large rocks -> crossed wall -> cutted woods, etc.

Your sixth page is the scary tree, after which you immediately start sprinting. Hit the silo, and cut through the woods toward the middle of the map (this is the riskiest part of the play, but it can't be helped). While in the woods, do not sprint. Then once you reach the open area, cut straight for the bathrooms, losing Slenderman around corners if you can, and head straight for the room where you found the note earlier.

The bathroom is scariest because two of the four rooms have only one path in and out, which means if you get inside and Slenderman follows you in, you can't escape. But as long as that's your final page, you don't need to.

Hope you enjoyed this blog, and good luck getting Slender'd!

Slender TEP: Playing to Win

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