First & Blind Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpf-M0FhKE

The 'Spot The Difference' genre of indie horror gets a welcome rethink with a stylish Japanese subway aesthetic, and PT-esque location-looping putting players directly in the thick of the spooky anomalies. For me, it's a more engaging shift from the screen-watching of cult breakout I'm On Observation Duty, with spookiness ranging from the head smackingly subtle to the downright startling. All anomalies feel like they play fair, and there's extra fun in finding them all (with a convenient counter supplied), and entering into some of their fail states. Simple, but cheap fun. High on quality with potential to do more.

The game that teaches you that smiling at someone in public is an anomaly. This is a really fun (and cheap at $4) experience where you walk through the same hallway scene over and over and look for differences to help you escape.

I'm seeing from other reviews that this is a genre of games, but this is my first of these "spot the difference" type games and I had a lot of fun with it. Some differences are super obvious and others are very subtle. The very subtle ones will have you 2nd guessing whether you actually missed the anomaly or not in each pass-through. This makes a fun but tense playthrough, hoping you can get that number to keep climbing to 8 and escape.

I would love to see a sequel to this with multiple environments!

The subject of liminal spaces has exploded in popularity recently, having had a loyal following before, but pushed to the spotlight by the short movie The Backrooms released a few years ago. Similarly, the spatial loop became a trend following P.T.'s ever shifting hallway. Finding itself in the intersection of those two thoroughly abused trends, it's unlikely I'd have given The Exit 8 the time of day had I not seen it in action beforehand.

As one would expect from the $4 price tag, it's a simple game, based entirely on observation: the player is in a subway station and must get from exit 0 to exit 8. To do that, they must pass through a hallway with set characteristics: a set of posters, a row of doors, signage and so on. If everything about the hallway looks right, they press on to the next exit. If there's something fishy going on, they must turn back. Failure to observe these guidelines loops them back to exit 0.

When displaying an anomaly in the station, the game picks randomly from a few dozen possible anomalies, a set which ranges from subtle shifts to surreal occurrences that are immediately noticeable. Conditioning the player into paying close attention to small details then tossing in something clearly unnatural is a highly effective way to get a jump out of them, making The Exit 8 a great horror game for people who aren't great with the horror genre.

Its biggest success, however, is in the short and dense runtime. The Exit 8 is cheaply produced, as is made evident by the use of Unreal asset packs and the appalling performance for an experience that takes place entirely in a hallway. Had the game stretched itself thin and tried to pad runtime, its weaknesses would have begun to show, however, since it makes a point of not repeating events the player has already seen, it proves an enjoyable pastime.

Was kinda lucky on my first try.
But its a fun little observation game. Went back to see all differences.

Took me 7min for my first ending and 36min for completition.
It can get a bit creepy.

The Exit 8 isn't groundbreaking in any sense. Fortunately, what it does do is executed to near perfection in almost every facet. The game's fantastic visuals and audio help improve an already engrossing atmosphere, and the gameplay itself is about as good as it possibly could be given the type of game it is. I hesitate to go into specifics because the quality of the experience this game provides relies on the player knowing little to nothing going in. Because of that, I have to recommend the game to anyone reading. It's neither long nor difficult, and the experience is well worth the price. Please try to avoid any and all spoilers going in, as I wrote earlier, minimizing knowledge of the game before starting it is key, and that minimization includes even the game's store page, which reveals much more than it should. Go find your exit.