Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: November 29, 2023
Publisher: PLAYISM
Developer: KOTAKE CREATE
Play Time: 2.4 Hours
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I'd been aware of The Exit 8 for a while, probably around the time I was reviewing Dreamcore and POOLS, and the concept of another liminal game combined with a spooky version of 'spot the difference' mechanic was very appealing. So I picked the game up last week when I saw it was on sale along with The Cabin Factory. The game is up front with what you have to do to proceed: walk forward and, if you spot an anomaly, turn around and walk the other way, although what specifically the anomalies are and how they manifest vary greatly. One anomaly might be as obvious as a sign being upside down or the black ooze leaking from an air vent, while others might be more difficult to spot, like the man whom you constantly pass is no longer holding the phone in his left hand.
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Your overall goal in the game is to escape the series of seemingly endless hallways by reaching Exit 8. If you pass through a hallway that doesn't have an anomaly, the number on the large yellow sign will go up by one. If you see an anomaly and you turn around, when you reach the sign, the number will have increased by one. If you fail to see an anomaly and continue through the hallway, the number will reset to zero, and you will start back from the beginning. If you think you see an anomaly but there isn't one there, and you head back the way you came, the number will reset to zero, and you will start over from the beginning.
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I definitely went through various stages of emotion with this game. First, there was the general uncomfortableness that you might experience playing a game in a liminal space. Then there was excitement about noticing something different in the environment, like a light that wasn't blinking before or a severed foot in the middle of the floor. Then there was the horror of the situation, and feeling scared when you turn the corner and stop, but continue to hear footsteps from behind you. Then there's frustration when you enter the hallway after passing the yellow sign, now with the number 7 emblazoned on it, convinced that you don't notice any anomalies, only to see a 0 on the sign when you round the corner at the end of the hallway. Then there's whatever emotion "fuck all" defines as you start sprinting through the hallways, only giving a haphazard glance around before you decide to continue or turn back (see my playthrough series Part 5). And at some point, there's paranoia as you first come across the yellow sign with 8 on it, looking no different than all of the other iterations of the sign except the number. You enter the hallway and begin to second-guess everything, all of the times you were convinced that you didn't see anything, only to have the number reset to zero.
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For me, I didn't look up any of the guides on Steam listing all of the known anomalies at first. I wanted to see how far I could get on my own, convinced that I had a decent memory and an eye for noticing differences. To me, it would be like looking up all of the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness and not being surprised by the bathtub scene. After an hour, I did look up a spoiler-free post, just to see if there was a mechanic that I was missing that was causing me to return to zero, and I inadvertently saw a reference to two anomalies. After two hours and still coming back to that zero on the yellow sign, I gave in and looked up a guide for all of the anomalies. I saw that, apart from one anomaly, I had already seen most of them, and the two I hadn't seen were somewhat obvious, like the lights in the hallway turning green, or the walking man wearing a baseball hat.
On my sixth attempt, I finally made it out after several runs where, looking back at my video, I missed some pretty obvious anomalies, but I was just moving too fast to notice what was off about the hallway. Seeing those stairs at the end of the hallway, I felt a sense of relief, although still cautious that there was going to be a stinger of an ending, which I wouldn't put it past this kind of game to pull.
Since this is a Game EXP article, I wanted to go into more specifics about how I played The Exit 8, but I can't really do that without getting into spoilers, because part of this particular liminal game is discovering how the game works apart from the list of rules that the game gives you at the beginning. I had thought about not including some of these points, but while rewatching my playthrough videos, I laughed at my assumptions. So I am going to include those below the spoiler warning. So, only continue reading if you don't mind spoilers.
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~SPOILERS~
One of the first things I started doing, even before reading the rules, was to stay to the left of the yellow line. There was a sign that said "Keep Left," and I read that as one of the potential rules. This, in fact, was not one of the rules, but me taking things literally.
Probably like a lot of people who didn't look up a walkthrough before playing, I was fully expecting there to be some super subtle anomalies associated with the posters on the wall. I didn't think that the developers would have swapped Kanji characters, as this would alienate just over half of Steam's user base. Likewise, I didn't think that there would be any misspellings or alterations to the date or time on any of the posters. When the woman in the poster developed longer hair and creepy eyes, that was the kind of anomaly I was expecting. I was also thinking that there would be additional anomalies, like maybe the dogs in the third poster attacking each other. In the fourth poster, with all the people milling about, I was expecting there to be someone standing in the middle of that room holding a knife, and everyone else was murdered, maybe with the lone person looking out to the viewer. Considering how many times I reset back to zero after missing an anomaly, I was convinced that something was happening with the posters that I was missing.
Focusing on the posters was one reason I didn't pay much attention to the walking man at first. As long as he looked relatively normal, then I didn't need to give him so much of my focus, where there were six posters on the other wall. Early on, I had experienced his face looking strange, him smiling, and him following me, and that all seemed pretty obvious compared to what my brain was telling me could be wrong with one of the posters.
After a while, I also thought that there could be an anomaly associated with the doors; apart from the door knob placement, and there being a door missing. I noticed that the far left door was only two tiles away from the electrical box with the red light, and eight tiles away from the door to the left. The doors were also three tiles higher than the electrical box. Sadly, another thing I was focusing on turned out to be a self-imposed red herring.
Another thing that I thought might have been an unspoken rule that wasn't was that at some point, I thought you had to be moving the entire time, that you couldn't stop, and that was the reason why I kept failing and going back to zero. Which I recognize doesn't make any sense, as there were plenty of times I had stopped to notice an anomaly, turned around, and progressed, but for some reason, my brain thought, "Maybe if I kept moving, that might prevent me from going back to zero.
As I mentioned above, after two hours of playing, and always seemingly missing an anomaly or two, I did look up a guide, and that was when I found out about "The Face." The Face was described as a face that looks like it's made out of smudges of dirt on the ceiling. There were a lot of people commenting on never seeing The Face, and it likely being the reason that they didn't spot an anomaly even when they were so very thorough. I only barely saw The Face during my last run (in Part 6), or you can go up and look at the ceiling in the second-to-last picture in this article. There's The Face between the light closest to the top of the picture and the next light down; the mouth might even be part of that second light. It's that hard to see, although I think the screenshot from the video is a bit darker than what I saw in the game, but it really was that faint.
One of the more frustrating things about this game, apart from coming back to zero, was when it would happen immediately after seeing a very obvious anomaly, like the poster shaking, or when the walking man was a giant. Since the game locks that specific anomaly away (put a pin in that for a second), it feels like a wasted use of an anomaly that could have been used to beat the game. Missing an anomaly was even more frustrating after passing hallway four because it felt like, "Yeah, I'm halfway there, that wasn't too difficult! Ahhh damn, now I'm back to zero." So it kind of felt like a waste of time.
I've read criticism of one of the game's core mechanics, that after you see an anomaly and turn around, it removes that anomaly from the pool the game pulls from, which means that the only anomalies you end up coming across after an hour playing are often the ones that are difficult to see, being the whole reason you missed them. This brings up the question of whether, if you have only one anomaly remaining when you start a run, will seven of the eight hallways be free of anomalies? There's another mechanic that resets your anomaly queue, which happens if you fail certain anomalies, possibly the false exit, or being caught by the flood. Other anomalies will "kill" the player, such as the aforementioned flood, but also walking through the open door to the void, or being caught by the tiled man. Do these events also reset your progress? In my run in Part 5, I believe I started seeing anomalies repeat, like the lights turning off, the flood, the creepy eyes on poster #3, and the walking man starting to follow you. Was this because I triggered an event that reset my progress, or was it because I had too few anomalies left in my queue for a complete run?
In the two-and-a-half years since The Exit 8 was released, there have been a lot of games that use a similar mechanic, spot the anomaly while passing through a repeating room. The 18th Attic is a recent example, and I'm playing another VR game that uses the same premise, although in a different underground setting. I get it, it's a fun mechanic that starts out scary because of the liminal space and the smoothness that anomalies happen within a repeating setting that is uncannily familiar, and can easily turn to annoyance and frustration. That happened to me with The Exit 8, but I still had a lot of fun, and that's my final takeaway.
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