From Rainer Sickle:
Déjà vu is scary enough, but what if it happens again and again? What if I turn the corner and find myself on the same pedestrian path in the Tokyo subway – once, twice, again? That's what happens to me in a small first-person horror game “Exit 8” – Original title “Exit 8”.
I walk around the corner and there it is again: a white-tiled hallway lit by neon lights. On the left are the same advertising posters I sent a few seconds ago, and on the right are locked doors that lead to broom closets or service rooms.
And “liminal horror” greets you every day
Everything here is sterile, empty, somehow mundane and yet uncanny—hence a prototypical “liminal space,” a threshold or liminal area where no one can voluntarily stay longer than absolutely necessary. In recent years, in video games like “Backrooms” and in films like “Skinnarink” or Jordan Peele's “Us” “liminal horror” this kind of “out of place” subtle horror has set many creepy monuments.
The horror is mostly in the suspicion that I'm not alone here, and I'm not alone in “Exit 8”: every time I enter the corridor, the same person returns to the front with a briefcase. I stroll around the corner towards me. As always, he ignores me – only I notice that something is wrong here.
Create a castle
Be careful with continuous rotation
Everything, absolutely everything is the same as it was a minute ago. Or not? Is this door locked? Are any lights flashing differently than before? Or is the stranger this time looking at me with a creepy smile as he approaches?
When I notice something like that, I immediately turn around and back again – the only way I can escape the endless loop. Eight times I must identify randomly appearing “hostiles” on my way through a narrow section of the corridor, then finally escape from the underground at exit number 8. If I make a mistake, miss an anomaly, and keep moving forward, my correct results counter resets to zero. Some strange things are so obvious that they are scary, while others require closer attention.
“Exit 8” caught my attention and is an original game that makes the most of its simple idea. For the reasonable mini-price you'd pay to go elsewhere for a coffee, you get a nice, surprisingly atmospheric spooky puzzle mission between players on Windows.