I will fully admit that I was lazy in picking The Inevitability to be the subject of this week’s column. I went onto Steam and looked at the most recently released games with the “horror” tag. I saw a game with a plot summary that sounded kind of interesting and I picked it up. Was this a good method of choosing a subject? It turns out that no, it isn’t. Witness my suffering as I struggle to review The Inevitability.

The Inevitability is yet another Eastern European game, as I found out after purchasing it. The translation is just absolute nonsense, containing phrases such as “the recording tape” and “he haunt me” within the first ten minutes of gameplay. You play as a man who has lost his entire family and is currently on a very strange trip back home from the subway. Along the way, the player character is stalked by Death, who bears a remarkable resemblance to The Slenderman. In fact, the title screen uses the operator symbol from the Slenderman YouTube series “Marble Hornets.” A little bit of originality probably would not have killed anyone here.

There is nothing particularly visually appealing about this game, either. Actually, I do have one good thing to say about the visual design of “The Inevitability.” This is not a Unity game. It is instead made with FPS Creator. At least that means that there is a slight switch-up in the stock assets being used here. There’s also a slight change in the Slenderman design, since it now has kind of a skeletal face instead of just absolutely no face at all. There’s also a camera that the player gets early on, and of course as you approach the not-Slenderman, the camera begins to distort, just like in “Marble Hornets.”

There is something deeply flawed about the sound design of The Inevitability. I don’t even want to get into the sound effects. Why not? Because this is absolutely the worst voice acting that I have ever heard. That takes some doing considering that the voice acting is in a language which I do not even understand. There is zero inflection in the voice. A character can (and does!) go from describing absent-mindedly watching security cameras to panicking about a strange figure on the camera feed with absolutely no change in vocal tone.

I have absolutely nothing to say about the gameplay of The Inevitability. The only controls are directional movement (WASD), running, and a single button for all interaction. There are certainly games which are less interactive, but I’ve played very few games which compelled me to interact with them less than this one.

The Inevitability is absolutely not worth your time or money. I don’t know what I could possibly say to emphasize that any more. That’s not what I want to leave you with this week, though. Instead, I just want to remind all of you that Slenderman is a copyrighted character. He is not a mythological creature, he has a definite creator and was invented less than ten years ago. Please stop making Slenderman rip-off games. Please.