Slender Threads review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Short but stylishly surreal point-and-click adventure wonderfully weaves together horror and comedy

Have you ever wondered about your place in the world, and whether you are truly in control of your life? When Harvey Green, the protagonist of Slender Threads, arrives in the coastal town of Villa Ventana and witnesses one strange incident after another, he starts to doubt his own mind as he feels himself being pushed toward a destiny he would rather avoid if he had anything to say about it. Harvey’s story is masterfully told by Blyts, developer of the murder scene clean-up series Nobodies and the cartoony Kelvin and the Infamous Machine. No secret government assassins or wacky time-travel antics this time, though. Unraveling the story of Slender Threads feels like curling up in a cozy armchair by candlelight with a gothic horror novel, but it’s packaged up in a delightful and distinctive aesthetic with easy but satisfying, often enthralling gameplay as well.

Harvey Green is your average Joe. He’s a travelling salesman peddling books because as a writer he’s having trouble getting his stories published. Is he actually any good? You will find out during the course of the game, but the dialogues in Slender Threads definitely are, and they’re delivered by a great voice cast. They’re matched by gorgeous visuals and a masterful orchestral score that turn the experience into an eerie mystery adventure with a supernatural edge. It hooked me from the start, with Harvey waking from a nightmare while staying overnight in Villa Ventana’s only hotel. As he goes for a stroll to calm his nerves, all kinds of strange events threaten to hijack his sanity, and it’s your job to see him through it all to the end.

His horrific nightmare presents a chilling display of Harvey’s head proudly displayed on a wall, along with a number of other people’s heads like some kind of hunting trophies. During his stay in Villa Ventana, he will witness several inhabitants perish under violent circumstances, followed by a memory of his nightmare showing each person’s head hanging on the wall beside his. Convinced he will be next in line, Harvey’s quest takes him in pursuit of an elusive woman named Lena, who might be able to offer some explanations.

With the hotel out of maps of the town, another guest points Harvey to the house of an acquaintance of hers who should still have a copy. Once there, however, Harvey finds the place abandoned and in disarray, as if its owner left in a hurry. While twiddling with the controls of an old radio, Harvey is bombarded by a vision of the past in which the man reveals that he and Lena are investigating strange creatures he calls the Shadows, before suddenly they are attacked by one. The majority of the game consists of following Lena’s trail through town, collecting inventory items in one location that help you acquire other items in the next, eventually granting Harvey access to Lena’s abode.   

Villa Ventana is one of those small fictional towns I wouldn’t mind exploring in real life, with four streets lined with all kinds of buildings. Once found, the stylishly drawn map offers fast-travel capabilities, and when you stumble upon an interesting location, the previously blank building on the map is colored in. But I still preferred walking and taking in the town’s atmosphere, especially since environments change over time and you might need to return to the streets to look for the next clue. Harvey has a satisfying walking speed, though he will turn it up a notch if you double-click on the sidewalks, and doing so on exits will immediately take you to the next screen.

Villa Ventana has all kinds of shops and businesses, several of which you can even enter. There’s the town hall, with its historical museum and archives. A nice pizza place looks exactly like an Italian courtyard, complete with a clothesline hanging above the tables. You can even visit a bustling casino with roulette, blackjack tables and slot machines. There’s no option to actually play them, which I didn’t mind because I’m not a fan of silly mini-games myself. Outside of town you can walk to the beach (and beyond it try to reach an off-shore lighthouse), an observatory on top of a hill, and an expansive forest just waiting for you to find an oil lamp so you can explore it. The cloudy night skies and mountainous horizons all around you are beautiful examples of artistry.

The side-scrolling scenery, both indoors and outdoors, has a cool diorama effect combining 2D and 3D visuals where objects in the foreground scroll faster than those in the back, creating depth in the hand-painted scenes. Puddles of rainwater reflect buildings and characters, pigeons take flight when you approach them, a fountain bubbles in front of the town hall, and the beach is alive with crabs. You will spot several extra characters, like diners in a restaurant or members of a hunting club, whom you can interact with but have no actual connection to the main plot. All of these things, with their related sound effects, enhance both immersion and the game’s already impressive production value.

The character designs in Slender Threads are pretty unique, with what look like little white pearls for eyes sitting in box-shaped heads. This gives them a puppet-like quality that adds to the overall creepiness factor, especially when Harvey experiences one of his visions and you seem to be sucked into one of his pearly eyes. What struck me most is how many people and places are designed with such attention to detail, yet you only ever need to visit them once. Like the hippy pottery maker, the grumpy pizza chef, the pushy real estate agent, and the astronomer lobbying against Pluto’s grab for planetary status – all great and funny characters in their own elaborate habitats, but only ever getting their five minutes of fame, if that.

Slender Threads

Genre:	Mystery, Thriller
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Paranormal
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Exploration
Control:	Direct Control, Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

Perhaps this is due to the low puzzle difficulty. While some things took me a bit longer to figure out, most inventory obstacles almost seemed to solve themselves. Any items that have proven their usefulness are automatically removed from your possession. This means you’re rarely holding onto many things at once, and the function of the ones you do have is usually pretty obvious. There’s no way to die or get a game over, though I did appreciate the saving-on-exit autosave function, combined with manual save slots. 

The puzzle I spent the most time on involved code-breaking, but it was due to confusing game mechanics rather than the solution being difficult. Villa Ventana is built near the ruins of an ancient civilization. Those people had their own religion and culture, but also their own numerical system. At one point, you find a piece of paper with a code written in their notation and you need to figure out which symbols stand for which decimal numbers. You can find several visual clues to figure it out, which is quite simple in itself, but I didn’t know how to transpose the code on the piece of paper. It turned out I just had to talk to the character I needed to give the numbers to, not by handing over the decoded paper but by choosing the correct dialogue options. The confusing part is that generally dialogue options you already asked are conveniently grayed out, but for some puzzles you will need to try them again after certain conditions have changed. They are still greyed out but will garner different reactions this time.

Other than a couple of non-intuitive puzzle solutions, however, I had a blast playing through Slender Threads. The relative ease kept the pace humming, and it was always exciting when a blocked-off region would suddenly become available, allowing me to explore more of this richly detailed setting. There’s never a need for pixel hunting, though there are plenty of red herrings all over the place; objects you might think you can use but can only be examined. Every solution makes perfect sense, and I loved how a new piece of the story unfolded after solving each puzzle. Many times the outcome would be something totally different than I expected, sometimes with disastrously unintentional consequences. The writers seamlessly go from creepy-scare to laugh-out-loud funny, and they totally get away with it because it’s all handled respectfully, and not in a goofy, cartoonish style.  

Intriguingly, the point-and-click controls offer two options. The cursor automatically changes to the most relevant shape when you hover over a hotspot – magnifying glass to examine, hand to pick up, and a head to talk – so you only have to left-click to perform the action. Click right, however, and you open a verb coin where you can choose the other options. Half the time this treats you to a witty bonus comment from Harvey, but the other half he resorts to the same generic response, which misses the entire point of bonus content. It’s a shame because it’s worth hearing some of the optional extra comments, but too much repetition will probably encourage players to stick with the simple one-click interface instead. You can play through the entire game perfectly well without opening the verb coin even once.

Your inventory is accessed by clicking a briefcase icon in the top right of the screen. Combining items there took some getting used to, because you need to drag one item onto another to use them together. Simply clicking an item automatically takes you back to the play area to try the item on hotspots. This felt very unintuitive to me, and I kept making this mistake throughout the game.

If you think you may have overlooked anything, you can highlight all hotspots in a scene, and if you really find yourself stuck, you can use Harvey’s trusty notebook. This is a built-in hint system that slowly delves deeper into the most urgent puzzle’s solution. It starts by stating the obvious, giving a short description of the situation and obstacles. Then it offers suggestions on where to go or who to speak to. I discovered this accidentally, thinking the notebook was more of an objectives checklist. After clicking on the notes a couple of times, I finally realized I was getting a bit too much information, and quickly closed the book to continue figuring things out on my own (which isn’t all that hard to do).

While the gameplay is fairly straightforward, the story of Slender Threads is full of surprises. If your nerves are as easily rattled as Harvey’s, you will experience the occasional jump scare, though they are quite innocent, like when you stumble upon yet another stray cat hiding in the shadows – there’s even a hidden achievement for finding all felines! The plot contains supernatural elements, and while people tend to die in quite graphic ways, the focus isn’t really on horror but more on thrilling you with strangeness. In the same vein, there are unexpected scene changes that suddenly show different perspectives, like flashes from the past and a psychedelic trip to a doctor’s office after Harvey eats a strange mushroom and now sees giant, sentient human organs blocking his path while the entire room is vibrating with strange colors.

Too soon for my liking, I reached the game’s conclusion after a short five hours. The ending no doubt will divide the public; some will think it’s brilliant, others might feel it’s a cop-out. Whatever your opinion, do stay for a playable post-credits epilogue, which takes the idea from the ending and elaborates on it further to keep you entertained for an extra half hour before the curtain drops definitively on Harvey Green’s creepy yet often morbidly funny adventures.

Final Verdict

Slender Threads immediately immersed me in its weird tale of spooky shadow creatures threatening a whole town’s very existence. Even with its plethora of locations, the quirky, beautiful town of Villa Venata is easy to get around. Moving from place to place and character to character is fun, though never all that challenging except for some small gameplay hiccups that could use some fine tuning. The moody orchestral soundtrack is a perfect companion, and the natural-sounding voice cast fits the bill perfectly. It’s a compact game but with great attention to detail, really filling the world with surprises and even some mild scares. When you dread the need to click on something, out of fear of what might come next, you know you are experiencing a captivating story. And when you can’t help but laugh at a comically lethal plot twist, you could feel a bit guilty about it, or you could just appreciate the perfect blend of horror and humor that lets you enjoy both in equal measure. 

Johnny played Slender Threads on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.

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