In 2012, Slender: The Eight Pages appeared on the indie freeware scene. By virtue of its freeware nature, accessibility (all you do is walk around some woods and look for pieces of paper), and the popularity of creepypastas like Slenderman and other modern urban legends at the time, Slender became a huge hit. Naturally, many copycats would follow and try to capitalize on this kind of low-budget, minimal gameplay type of horror. The Hat Man: Shadow Ward, which arrived on Steam's Early Access program in 2014 before officially releasing in 2016, is one such example.

You play as the parent (either the father or the mother) of a girl staying in a mental ward due to her severe insomnia and likely depression and suicidal ideation. A letter arrives from the ward informing your character that their daughter recently went missing but that staff are handling the search, so there's no need to travel there. Naturally, your character goes to the ward anyway because, you know, their child has gone missing.

The ward is empty of staff and patients upon arrival, but some areas are unlocked. You go up to the daughter's room and find a strange looking journal. Touching the journal causes its pages to fly out and disappear and the whole building is cast in darkness. When the darkness passes, everything has changed into a dingier and more unsettling otherworld version, not unlike the world transitions in the early Silent Hill games. You find a flashlight and a few pages of the journal, which contain writings from the daughter about happenings at the mental ward, and so your journey to find all the pages and your daughter begins.

As with Slender, you're being stalked by an entity as you go through the mazelike corridors of this mental ward. This is the titular "Hat Man," who more or less seems to be an extension of shadow person mythology and related creepypastas. He moves pretty slowly but can teleport randomly and sometimes pass through floors. He's constantly following you and can't really lose track of you, but will sometimes hold position if you're crouch walking out of his sight. Most of the time, though, it makes more sense to just walk away from him, break line of sight, and continue walking or sprinting along since his speed doesn't grow very quickly. I had more trouble with accidentally bumping into him while sprinting than being snuck up on from behind.

This is the type of game where you walk through a lot of repetitive environments and click on dirty bathroom stall doors to check whether a needed item might be inside. The Hat Man himself doesn't look very scary, but as I collected more pages the ambient sounds did become creepier. The audio is probably the most well executed aspect here, and it's nice to see that the daughter's journal and the (optional) voiceovers for both parent characters are fully voice acted. It's not award-winning voice acting, but it's decent.

The game doesn't tell you too much about how it works. Over time I intuited that flickering lights indicated when the Hat Man was in the general vicinity and that whispering voices were hints that a journal page was somewhere nearby. The journal itself begins to blend storytelling/lore with game hints as you find more pages, like sharing that the mental ward otherworld will change shape without warning when you try backtracking. That ever changing maze idea is a nice blend of narrative and gameplay that prevents easily mapping out the whole maze on paper (if you were so inclined), but also adds to the sense of repetition. You see a lot of similar rooms and then sometimes you're literally seeing the same rooms because your sense of direction is being messed with on top of the visual uniformity of the environments.

I went through a few attempts at winning over the course of an hour. Occasionally, I did start to feel a little bit of anxiety as the ambience improved and became creepier alongside my progress, but every time the Hat Man showed up again I relaxed because he's not that spooky. The vast majority of the game I spent wandering partway into rooms one at a time, just close enough to hopefully pick up on any whispering audio that would lead me to a page, and then onto the next. Obviously the point of the maze design is to make finding the journal pages harder, but finding myself in previously searched areas over and over because everything looks so similar that I couldn't keep track of where I already came from gets dull. It's a pretty boring game if you're not immersed in the atmosphere, much like Slender was. In a way, I guess that makes The Hat Man: Shadow Ward a pretty good Slender clone and potentially better since there's more story and presentation here. It's hard for me to escape the sense that this is a free browser game with a few extra bells and whistles, though. Supposedly, it's also a bit buggy, but I didn't play long enough to encounter much of that.

According to my old Steam receipt, I got this game on sale for just under \(5. The normal price at the time was \)15. Today, the normal price is \(10. This is a pretty amateur game, so there's no way it warrants \)10-15 when there's much better you could buy for that much. Still, it has a bit more to it than the freeware Slender it owes almost everything to, so I'd say paying less than $5 was about right.