Kotake Create is kind of in the unenviable position of attempting to create a follow-up to a game that works at its absolute best when you know practically nothing about it. Am I convinced that the gameplay shift they deployed here was enough to differentiate or elevate it from Exit 8? Not really!

I'm aware of my outlier state here in the sense that I was the first to review Exit 8 on Backloggd, as I played it blindly practically the minute it landed on a pirate aggregate website, and even rightfully predicted in my log for it that it'd usher in a new genre of horror-adjacent knockoffs in a flurry similar to the Backrooms pishwater that's been flushing through the Steam pipes for the past year or so. It blew me away because it navigates the unknown ~so well~, meaning I probably value the experience of playing a little higher than most who didn't get to avoid any implication as to what the game was. Exit 8 has indeed had many imitators - very few that capture what makes its incredibly simple premise and gameplay loop so innately engrossing, most of which take the form of absolute dunderhead horror pastiches where you're escaping a boarded-up Saw house or an abandoned hospital and shit like that. For what it's worth, Platform 8 plays very differently to Exit 8 and it'll probably be a refreshing change to many, I just find what this game does to be a far more standard "avoid the danger" affair than the wonderfully inquisitive design Exit 8 predicates itself on. In all honesty, I didn't expect a second bottle of lightning - but I hoped for something special I could gnaw on, and it just didn't happen.