Alas, here we are again. A situation where time dictates our site-wide, collective consensus on what are to be thehighlightsof the respective year will finally be made known. A sizable summary and conclusion into the best (and yes, worst) that the past twelve months have provided us. One problem: there’s always going to be that one game or two to emerge amid the final remnants of late November/early December that may or may not have deserved some spotlight. Worse still if it’s during the former; that said release actually turns out to be interesting enough to cover. As a counter maybe, no one (myself included) will be framing a game like The Exit 8 in talk of potential last-minute Game of the Year material. There will be no references to it being the dark horse or the game flying under many a person’s radar. There will be no major upsets or recollection on what could’ve, should’ve and might’ve been.Chained Echoes, this situation is not.
What The Exit 8 is however, is an extremely solid proof of concept I would be more than happy to see reemerge in some hypothetical, spiritual successor of sorts. A successor that, at the very least, is a fair bit longer than around ten or so minutes to reach end credits. Yet despite its surprisingly short run-time, as well as its limited – if at all existent – replayability, what KOTAKE have created here is nothing if not smart in how it utilizes player discomfort. Far from what you or I may consider a “horror” game in a traditional sense, its roots in the genre’s more Psychological leanings are clear to sport. The most poignant moments of uncertainty, anxiety and distrust in what one is witnessing, less to do with what the game is or isn’t showing, but more to do with what you think it is or isn’t showing.
The basic premise of The Exit 8 is such: players are unwittingly placed into an infinitely-repeating subway tunnel of ordinary design. The catch is that amid these loops of the same passageway lie what the game dubs Anomalies. Changes in the surroundings and amid even the objects decorating the seemingly bland, white-tiled space that if not spotted, doom players to be trapped. Your only recourse is to determine if said corridor at any point contains an Anomaly or not. As the in-game instructions dictate: spot an Anomaly, turn back; deem it all clear, simply proceed on. The overall objective is to the reach titular eighth exit and leave the subway tunnels back into normality. A relatively simple, Hidden Object-esque concept on paper that from the outset doesn’t necessarily sound all that special.
That the gameplay lands at a purely binary choice – carry on or go back the way one came – adds credence to this assumption. Simply moving about the space is one’s only means of interaction and aside from a solitary NPC of whom serves as part of the environment one must study and assess, The Exit 8 is a sterile-looking release. Deprived of music, narration, a plot, a striking art-style and all other means of allowing it to stand out in other feasible ways. It’s a game that’s purely mechanical and even that is minimal. So why does it work? Better still, work incredibly well for a game that can be started, finished and subsequently beaten in its entirety in around thirty minutes tops?
Simple: The Exit 8 places the onus back on the player and their [in]ability to stave off impatience and ineptitude. How careful they are in combing over the finer details, the less-obvious parts of this seemingly ordinary-looking, ordinary-feeling space. And the most crucial question of them all: how good are you at learning from one’s mistakes? Because some of the Anomalies (of which there are roughly thirty to discover/experience here) are subtle. There are the more obvious examples – two of which are so clearly paying homage to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining. So too there are the kind of emerging scenarios that, for better or worse, play into the need for a jump-scare or two. But thankfully, most are integrated in such a way that not only demand players take their time and thoroughly examine everything, but eventually, bring it to its natural conclusion whereupon everything observed is scrutinized.
The way that paranoia and distrust slowly begins to seep into one’s reading of the game is perhaps where The Exit 8 finds its greatest stride. Doing so without much else in the way of how it’s designed; again, this is a game of minimal interaction. But the fact The Exit 8 succeeds at making even the most basic of binary decisions feel even more stressful. Not least when one has made it to the sixth or seventh consecutive correct guess and the stakes only grow. That figurative finish line is getting closer and closer, but you know full well that one wrong decision will throw you right back to the start. In a game whose visuals and presentation are sparse, the pressure The Exit 8 places on its players is clear to spot. Made better/worse by the fact that Anomalies are entirely random in their order. Anomalies don’t necessarily get harder or lesser in visibility per se, but rather that they pop up in areas that may not seem all that important to observe to begin with. It’s in situations like this, where even the smallest or most insignificant details are granted immense influence on a player’s perception. When in reality, their presumption of grander importance could be exactly that: presumption and nothing else.
It’s here where the psychological leanings come into full view to great effect. Reframing even the most meager or dispensable of in-game artistic assets as some crux by which success or failure will be determined. All of which is manufactured, albeit temporarily, by the player themselves, not the game. This subversion of creating hierarchy in a player’s mind is why The Exit 8 is as fascinating a game as it is. As brief an investment it might end up being, that a developer can craft a fifteen-minute experience with more warranted involvement and intriguing design than a fair number of releases that extend well into the tens of hours. The kind of design that places player engagement at its center, offering no easy route out in the process. One can only hope KOTAKE use this as the foundation for some bolder, more ambitious future project in the near future – The Exit 8, short an experience it might be, does more in ten minutes what a lot of games fail to achieve over ten hours.
