Remember Slenderman? He’s back. In Half-Life form

Let’s play a game. Let’s see how long we can talk about Half-Life without bringing up the elusive third entry yet to emerge. Wait. Damn, we’ve already lost. How long was that? Anyway, yes, despite continued hopes that Valve may still make a third installment in its iconic FPS series, we’re still not there.

So why bother with HL3 when we have Half-Life at home? More specifically, we have mods. And even though Halloween is now over (just), we can still get our spook on with this download from ModDB user ScriptedSnark.

This one may actually spark a bit of nostalgia in some – especially those with an interest in indie horror games – as it reimagines Slender: The Eight Pages in the original Half-Life engine, GoldSrc. From the images alone, it does look to be a faithful take on the cult Slender game, which, by the way, is more than 12 years old at this point.

What even is time?!

I remember The Eight Pages quite fondly. Though short, it very much left an impression on people who dared to open up the .exe file. If you’re not familiar with the game, it came to prominence around the time the whole Slenderman “mythos” started to take off.

The game itself placed you in a wooded area in the middle of the night, with naught but a flashlight to help you see your way through. The object was to collect eight pages that have been scattered around the area, stapled onto a tree, for example.

The twist was that each one you picked up would ramp up the scares. The creepy Slenderman would begin to emerge, teleporting closer to your location to try and capture you. The music would thump, your heartbeat would race faster, and, for some of us, collecting just a few pages was enough to close down the application.

It’s nice to see Slenderman – despite him no longer being the horror darling of the internet – coming back via Half-Life‘s engine. However, it remains to be seen whether the mod gives you a crowbar for you to slap the ghoulish creature silly.