The Haunted Hoard: The Exit 8 (PS5)

In The Exit 8, you find yourself walking through an unassuming hallway in a Japanese metro station. To your left, there are six posters hanging on the tiled wall. On your right, a few doors and some vents. A man is walking in the opposite direction, carrying a briefcase and smartphone as he pays you no mind when he passes. It’s the kind of hall you’ll have walked through hundreds of times in your life and quickly forgotten about, this liminal space an unassuming connection between areas of greater importance. However, as you leave the hallway this time, you turn the corner and find yourself facing the exact same space once more. Any attempt to press on or go back just brings you one more to this little slice of the metro, but as you pass through it again and again, you might start noticing changes. Some are subtle, some are so in your face they threaten your very life. But the only way out is to press on, searching for a way to find Exit 8 that will help you escape this endless repetition.

The Exit 8 is a first-person game where you don’t know who you are and the game never makes an effort to tell a story. You are simply in this odd scenario and need to find a way out, but it’s not as simple as walking forward and seeing what strangeness might occur. Instead, to actually reach Exit 8, you must take a closer look at the hallway each time you reenter it. Anomalies can manifest in the hallway, and should one be present, you must immediately turn back. If the hallway is just the same as it usually is, you continue on. To escape the looping halls you must correctly identified if the hallway is abnormal or not multiple times in a row, the name Exit 8 actually coming from the fact you must safely traverse an unaltered hall eight times to find your exit. If you guess wrong, your progress will be reset back to zero, The Exit 8 almost like a spot-the-difference game but with free movement and some eerie undertones.

 

The shape the anomalies can take in The Exit 8 can vary quite a bit. You might enter the hallway and see two strange men standing in it or notice that man that walks past you normally is behaving differently, obvious anomalies but also ones that might capture your interest and compel you to investigate. The Exit 8 will reset you if you meet your end to one of the more dangerous abnormal occurrences, but since the game is about walking through hallways to see if weird things happen, sometimes curiosity is a captivating enough to draw you into self-destruction. You’ll get reset, sure, but if you aren’t too far in yet, it’s a risk worth taking to satisfy your desire to see what unusual ideas can be found. However, as you near the final exit, you start to more truly fear the little changes since the game, while short, still requires a good deal of attention to overcome. The more flagrant alterations are easy to spot, but the simple hallway can have far subtler changes that require you to gradually get familiar with even the tiny details of the space around you. Since the game won’t tell you what an anomaly can entail, you start fastidiously checking the few objects of interest, fearing that you might overlook an alteration if you are too hasty.

Thankfully, The Exit 8 isn’t outright cruel with the shape an anomaly can take. It won’t be something as small as a single tile out of place or the Japanese words on the wall having a few letters swapped. However, there are some that require you to pay attention to spaces that you might brush over if you play too hastily, and some objects that blend into the background might actually be the clue you keep overlooking when you seem to be getting unexplained resets. The Exit 8 does try to ensure its anomalies won’t repeat in a singular play session to keep things fresh and avoid having progress become too easy, and when you do start spotting the minute differences it can provide a satisfying sense that you’ve overcome one of the game’s more subtle tricks. However, it’s easy to become paranoid as well, looking over every spot in the hall for fear you might be overlooking some slight alteration when actually it might just be the safe standard layout. Admittedly, the longer you play, the more tedious this process can be. There is only so much to look at and flagrant anomalies, while often the standout changes in terms of their strangeness or how eerie they can be, are also not so common that they’ll keep things consistently exciting. There can be stretches where you scour the tiled hall over and over only for a few halls in a row just for them to be the plain one, but that anxiety over being wrong is where the game gets its more common brand of fear, that sense that something might be off but you just can’t put your finger on it.

 

Once you do clear The Exit 8, the only thing really left to do is go back and try to find anomalies that you hadn’t spotted before, but in the process of beating it, it’s rather possible you’ll have seen them all unless you have a particularly good eye. It is nice that you can try to find them all and the game will inform you once you’ve done so, but The Exit 8 is really just a brief nervous hunt for minor differences broken up by the more eye-catching and creepy ones. Making the player turn back and flee when they’ve spotted one is an appropriate touch though, running away from unease whether it be a minor abnormality or a truly dangerous one adding a little energy on top of feeling like a thematic tie to the fear of comfortable normalcy being altered by the unknown. The Exit 8 only really uses text to tell you the basics or fill out its posters so it never comes forward with much of a stated message, that perhaps found more in its later film adaptation Exit 8, this game really more about the sensation it evokes in the player than anything grander. In fact, it almost feels like it could have been part of a larger game as a brief eerie section instead, and games like Control already had such things with its Oceanview Motel puzzle where you must spot differences in identical spaces. The Exit 8 keeps it concise so it can dial into emotion most strongly of all though, and while it can frustrate before you really start getting a keener eye for important details, it is an effective experience despite its brevity and deliberate simplicity.

THE VERDICT: The Exit 8 isn’t a complicated game. You walk down the same hallway, sometimes spotting something unnerving, but other times you must closely check the space you’ve quickly become familiar with to make sure something hasn’t changed. It has enough of the bigger eye-catching anomalies to make for interesting disruptions but that unease of something small being out of place is what gives the game its nervous energy, and while it can get tedious and a bit irritating to just be scanning the same space over and over, the maddening feeling being broken by the little triumphs of spotting the subtler changes makes the concept work even if it is a rather short and repetitive experience.

 

And so, I give The Exit 8 for PlayStation 5…

An OKAY rating. The Exit 8 essentially takes that unsettling feeling of noticing something slightly out of place and turns it into an experience with minor stakes but ones that still make you pay close attention to your repeating surroundings. Using only the single subway station hallway as a setting limits its breadth in good and bad ways, the experience not cluttering the space to the point it drags to search it all but also The Exit 8 isn’t really a game worth returning to. The anomalies are the draws, and you get some of the more eerie and strange ones to pay off your interest between the really small changes that can be easily overlooked if you aren’t being careful. A longer game could use this format as an effective format for a spooky section contrasting normalcy with surreal changes, but overdoing it would also run the risk of wearing down the player since the searching of this single simple hallway also starts to lose its luster just trying to reach the last metro exit. More creative or bombastic anomalies would be more memorable and exciting payoffs, but doing them too often would also take away from the nervous hunt for differences that define this game’s anxious tone. It would even start to move it towards a game more about reliably encountering unusual horror scenarios, something already found in other small games that The Exit 8 avoids competing with by emphasizing the minor changes most of all. It’s still a game for a more patient player and not one with much meat to it, but it is a fairly cheap game as well making it easier to justify taking the plunge and playing it for the hour or two it takes to see everything this small experience has to offer.

 

The Exit 8 leans into that type of terror that comes from knowing something is wrong and not being able to put your finger on what, but with the added catharsis of actually being able to spot it and get rewarded for training your eye well enough to identify it. It can still be a bit of a dull task to scan each object to see if it has undergone a slight change, but the anomalies can be eerie even when they’re not drastic in how they’ve changed, still playing into the game’s efforts to make you uncomfortable without always having to whip out something truly dangerous. Look at the pictures on the posters, the shape of the objects in the halls, and don’t forget things can look different when viewed from different angles, and over time you’ll get to reach the exit but not before you’ve had to push yourself to spot those unnerving abnormalities that change the unassuming subway hallway into something uncanny.