Slender The 8 Coins is a game that demands patience. It needs to be thought carefully to figure out where to go. Can it be rushed? No, this is a puzzle game that rewards a gentle, studious approach of careful logic and inventive experimentation as well as a bit of luck. It helps to keep an open mind too, for there are few rules that Slender The 8 Coins doesn't shatter with its swaths of non-Euclidean space and its dark, gloomy visuals. But while its trials of the mind verge on the extreme at times, they are an integral part of this remarkable achievement. Few games reward you with such an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction and intelligence, or boast such thought-provoking game design.
A starting point of the game.
Part of the charm lies in Slender The 8 Coins' reluctance--however complex the task--to provide you with anything more than the simplest of instructions. There's no hand-holding, no drawn-out tutorial section, and no quick-and-easy puzzle to get you started. Instead, you're placed in a small chamber where the walls are covered with the basic first-person controls, and an interactive map points you towards the first puzzle. It's from this room that you see the many secrets of the game unfold. With each puzzle you discover, the map grows larger, while another wall is gradually filled with unsettling but clever sketches and clues that you uncover during your journey.
Aside from providing visual feedback on your progress, this starting chamber performs an important task; it is the only constant in a journey full of misdirection. There are no set paths to wander down or a narrative to point you in the right direction. The joy of Slender The 8 Coins is in discovering new paths to collecting the 8 coins. When you encounter a new path, you never feel like you were pushed there. The path you take through Slender The 8 Coins is guided by your own curiosity and your own inventiveness. So it helps that at any point you can rejoin to create a new path and see the sprawling path you've carved through the many paths.
Those paths are unlike anything you may have seen before. The simple invisible portal and finely made trees that make up each parts of the forest provide an impeccable distraction-free backdrop for the most complex of ideas. To succeed in Slender The 8 Coins, you must be curious and always take new chances.
Where you might be inclined to push forward, going back may open up a new set of rooms. Jumping into a chasm might normally spot Slender, but here it is a means of exploring areas that are seemingly out of reach. There are no set rules to how these portals are connected or how they interact with one another, which makes wrapping your head around the game's most wild ideas a stiff but inherently satisfying mental challenge. If you get stuck, your only option is to mull over each path, and keep trying until you get it right. What little help you receive comes in the form of cryptic clues and illustrations scrawled onto portals that kick-start the thought process rather than give you direct hints about each puzzle.
What really messes with your mind, though, are the later combinations of logical and lateral thinking. The portals are used to open new paths. Those paths alone are tricky enough, but to switch between lateral and logical ways of thinking--and to often combine the two--is a challenge that can break even the most astute of minds. But with such great trials come even greater moments of elation. It helps, too, that the solutions never seem unfair.
Even during the later stages of your adventure, Slender The 8 Coins continues to surprise with its paths and delight with their solutions. Most impressive of all is how it creates a sense of foreboding and horror, not through its narrative or with cheap scare tactics, but with the objects themselves. When the very fabric of reality is made meaningless by a world where up can mean down, left can mean right, and walls can be nothing at all, everything takes on a deeply sinister edge. The soundtrack that backs it all up adds to the foreboding, building up as it does from nothing into a fittingly eerie, synth-driven ambient soundscape.
There are moments in Slender The 8 Coins that remain with you long after you've uncovered your last clue and solved your last puzzle. What has been created within its barren walls is supremely intelligent and wildly inventive, and Slender The 8 Coins doesn't give up its ideals for the sake of accessibility. The few spells of frustration are fleeting and never compromise Slender The 8 Coins' powerful achievements in design and style. You should choose to begin yours in Slender The 8 Coins: it really is quite unlike anything else.
