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.

You are Henry David Thoreau. You have just moved into a cabin by Walden pond. You fish, you observe nature, and you explore the woods you now call home. After a few days, you walk down the path to your family's house in Concord, where your mother has done your laundry.

I don't want to relitigate Thoreau's laundry habits. The critics and angsty English students have done that plenty without my input. More interesting is the mere presence of the word "laundry"—a word that doesn't appear once in the source text, here presented matter-of-factly to the player— which is an early signal from the game that it has a deep understanding of its source and an awareness of its criticisms. That makes it probably the best direct book to game adaptation I have played yet (and not just because of the lack of competition).

Walden is not a book about survival, and neither is this a game about survival. The punishment for failing to manage resources is minimal. Like the book, it's a game about becoming intimately familiar with a small slice of nature, about exploring and reexploring the same areas until the specific trees become memorable. Like the book, it's also about continuing to exist in society, not reject it. Concord itself is a significant enough hub of activity in the game that the player has the option of beginning the day in it instead of in the cabin. The game approximates Thoreau's visitors from the book with brief anti-slavery missions that serve to anchor the time period to a historical context but ironically lose a modicum of humanity. I imagine this was to get around the constraint of having to model and animate more humans. If that was the choice made in order to have the humans who are in the game look as good as they do, then it was the correct one.

That mission the game inherits from the book is somewhat counteracted by the attempts to make it a more typical video game. Points of interest are marked on the map, which resulted in a couple days of my Thoreau min/maxing his stamina in order to sprint to each. Shortly before winter I realized I forgot to buy an important upgrade and spent a full day grinding out money. Those moments seem antithetical to Thoreau's experiment but I suppose that's the nature of making it a game. Perhaps it's a different kind a fail state, one where the player failed to maintain Thoreau's narrative.

On the technical side, the game has exactly the amount of jank you'd expect from a game that launches with multiple arts endowment logos instead of corporate logos. Thankfully they never impede the experience except for one area where the jank overlaps with the artistry: the voice acting. Thoreau is played by Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild, Speed Racer) in a performance so inert I was surprised to learn from the credits that not only is he professional but a voice I should have recognized. The other performances, most notably Jim Cummings as Ralph Waldo Emerson, are serviceable at worst, so there's a stark, grating gulf in emotion when the bulk of the narrative sounds like it's being sight-read off a page yet attributed to a character for whom "inspiration" is a resource in need of active management by the player.

But you don't need to engage with Thoreau's audio or even his writing, which is the beautiful part of adapting this as a video game. I'm not a particular fan of Walden (the book) but it does irk me to see people criticize it for what it was never meant to be. I worry the same will happen to Walden (a game). This is not a survival game or an exploration game. It's a re-re-re-exploration game with some survival elements included, for you. If you want.

I choose to believe that Swery's intentions were good with this game, and I'm glad it seems to have genuinely helped some people, but I'm so tired of trans stories being portrayed just through the struggles of dysphoria rather than through the growing confidence and happiness that transitioning can lead to, through the pain wrought upon trans people by society rather than through found family and the comfort of finding others who understand you. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the game's runtime is spent deep in a mire of sadness (that read to me as almost comically over-the-top edgy at its worst points), and for a story that claimed to be about regeneration I wish there was more joy to be found here.

It also honestly just feels egregious to me that the primary gameplay mechanic of a story about a trans woman revolves around solving puzzles by choosing to amputate, immolate or just generally tear your body to pieces. This is problematic both because of how eerily reminiscent it feels of various TERF talking points (how they refer to gender-affirming surgeries as "mutilation"), and also because I don't want to be forced to hear our trans protagonist's leg bones crunch apart for the fiftieth time in the game. Trans people shouldn't be forced through the level of extreme pain this game asks of its protagonist just to be allowed to opportunity to finally heal, grow and be happy.

this game is the most upsetting thing i’ve ever touched in my life and nothing else even comes close to the amount of stress and discomfort this shit put me through.

one might be hesitant to start this one as the first half is incredibly banal, yes it possesses an interesting and unique aesthetic and concept but in execution it’s boring, the combat and movement is jank, the puzzles are weird, and the overall vibe is not silent hill in the slightest. in fact, it’s too easy. far too easy. the apartment serves as a saferoom that is accessible almost everywhere and heals you fully, making the game a cakewalk and allowing you to hoard healing items since you’ll never end up using them.

that all changes when you reach the second half of the game, and your “safe space” turns hostile, no longer healing you and randomly spawning disturbing anomalies throughout that you must track down and eliminate using limited resources that aren’t always easy to find. it’s not like you can avoid this place either since you still have to go back to save, swap out items, and collect lore dumps.

it doesn’t help that you must also watch over your neighbor and escort her throughout the entire second half of the game, doing everything in your power to prevent her from taking too much damage otherwise you receive the bad ending. that alone is enough to make this one of the hardest survival horrors of all time, but also the most tense and stressful.

this game is also just plain terrifying. with a legitimately scary antagonist and some of the creepiest and most disturbing set pieces and events in the franchise. the atmosphere and scares in conjunction with the gameplay makes for the most gut-wrenching, stressful, frustrating, sweat inducing gaming experience of all time.