Matt versus Slenderman

## Background

   With the urban myth of Slenderman (also known as Slender Man), depending on the incarnation, he is known as to wearing a black suit, is tall and slender, can usually extend his arms and legs to great lengths, has no face and tragedies befall people who come into contact with him.

The popularity of the Slender Man became very large in the late 2000s due to two reasons: one, a very well-known photoshop contest was held on the Something Awful forums, which one of the posts featured two Slender photos. In that incarnation, Slender mostly appeared to children, having tentacles and tragedies befell those that were involved with taking the pictures (the photographer went missing and a library that had one of the photos later burned to the ground).

Also, the Marble Hornets YouTube channel (which was formed in 2009), originally in regards to a student film of the same name, went way off course once Slender (also known as the Operator) started appearing in many shots while the movie was being filmed. In that version, characters that came into contact with him (Alex Kralie, Jay, Tim and Jessica) suffered various tragedies, memory loss and malfunctions of camera equipment, although using the latter usually hindered Slender as well. Slender was also joined by a masked henchman known as Totheark. As of mid 2016, the videos (spanning three seasons) had well over 80 million views.
In the **Matt versus Slenderman** game, the player controls Matt, who must gather nine pages of Slenderman and/or related drawings to make it through the game. Being released on the PICO-8 medium, the game can be played on various platforms. It was created by meeblue (Savorn Ath) and Mathieu Guay. It was published in 2016.

## Gameplay

Matt must be guided across a scrolling landscape to find and collect the pages. He can walk, jump and enter and exit through doors and a surface below the ground. Falling into pits, onto a spike, facing Slenderman for too long or coming into contact with him or a grim reaper at the end will cause the game to end. Also touching a multi-colored object in the castle area of the game will cause all onscreen platforms to turn into water, causing Matt to die if he falls into one of them or passes through them and lands on spikes.

Matt walks with a flashlight to illuminate immediate surrounding areas. A key can also be used to help navigate through certain areas of the game in order to reach pages. Matt is alerted to Slender’s nearby presence via brief full-screen rendition of Slender and the game will end if he faces Slender for too long. However, Matt can just be turned to face another direction for 1.5 seconds and then Slender will disappear.
Finding all nine pages will end the game, although it can never be won (see **Trivia**).

## Bonuses

The game has three play options: the normal play mode, turbo (Matt, Slender in his more dangerous state and the grim reaper move very quickly) and Matt can start the game in several different locations.

## Controls

* Start game–z (normal play mode), x (turbo) or arrow keys (start game in different area)
* View last page collected–x key
* Jump–z key
* Move–arrow keys
* Enter door/below ground area–up/down arrow keys
* Pause game–p or Enter key

## Trivia

* Unlike how the instructions claim, the player has to find nine pages rather than eight. The ninth page was a “surprise”. There is also no way to win the game, it can only be finished (as Matt will be caught by either Slenderman or the grim reaper character, or Matt can fall into a pit or impale himself on a spike).
* With every one or two pages that are gathered, the in-game music will change. Once the fifth page is acquired, Slenderman will turn into a dog-like creature and move at a very quick speed, sometimes directly at Matt.
* Due to the renditions of an Operator sign and the mask that Totheark wore in the Marble Hornets videos being found in the game, one might think the game’s creator based the game on the videos. Instead it was inspired by Slender: The Arrival, as the programmer wanted to “make a[n] 8-bit platform game based of Slender”.