Creepy children, dark forests and dimly-lit environments are all widely-used staples of the modern horror genre; indie horror is now a staple of the modern gaming industry. Wick, a Slender-like horror game, revolves around all three of these aforementioned clichés to create one of the most atmospheric video game forests in recent gaming memory.
Set inside an unnamed forest, you take on the role of a young female teenager, left alone by her friends. Taking part in a popular game spread around by rumors in the surrounding area, your goal is to simply survive, however, the souls of five deceased children will make the remaining six hours of your survival a very, very rough time.
Starting out, Wick looks like any other indie Slender-like game found on PC or XBLA. A dark, fairly low-detailed forest littered with seemingly random landmarks ranging from a school bus to a broken bridge starts off feeling incredibly generic. Your goal to survive is made easier by the use of candles, unlit ones being scattered around the woodland.
You start with a single lit candle and five matches. Either by using a lit candle to set others aflame or by literally putting a match to it you can use the other candles to help you survive—which are easily identifiable by a noticeable glimmer in the distance. Darkness is never your ally in Wick, it’s where your foes thrive. Each one of the five children have their own different attributes but one similarity is clear, they are much, much stronger than you and that strength is only multiplied in the shadows.
The five children all feel incredibly unique from one another with each one of the little ghosties providing a different challenge. Tim, Lillian, Benjamin, Tom and Caleb are varied enemies. Their appearance—like in Five Nights at Freddy’s—depends on what night it is, the stronger enemies appear alongside previously avoided foes in later stages. The techniques for beating each child need to be memorized if you’re going to beat all six of Wick’s nights. Tim requires you to just simply not look at him as you run away, Caleb requires you to be more careful as he travels underground whereas Tom requires you to stare at your feet or the sky in order to avoid him killing you.
Wick’s gameplay does get rather repetitive as you explore the same map over and over again, even if it does only last a few hours but developers Hellbent Games have put more effort into creating an intriguing, haunting environment than creating a variety of stages. Whereas its clichéd and bog-standard gameplay might have been done to death over the past five years, Wick’s chilling sense of being watched never fails. Crunching branches, soft but spooky music and the sounds of the children all create a perfectly molded atmosphere which—even with Wick’s unimpressive graphical quality—creates one of the most genuinely scare Slender-likes since the original Slender.
Summary
A creepy mood, no matter how competently it has been created, does very little to mar the constant recurrence of your in-game activities. Atmosphere is merely an immersion seller but when the game provides little else to be immersed, the world that Wick is set in starts to crack. Apart from its atmosphere, the other components of Wick are merely proficient in their execution. Collectibles provide much-welcomed backstory although that backstory is fairly limited, map variety is passable for the first couple of runs but then becomes a bore to walk around. Combined with limited gameplay, Hellbent Games’ indie horror is merely just two steps above the abundance of other Slender-likes on Steam. It’s still terrifying though.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.