I played Stairway recently, a game which I subsequently discovered was pretty much nothing but a clone of this game, and vowed to play Exit 8 to give the 'find anomalies in a creepy subliminal space' microgenre another chance. I didn't really like Stairway and, unfortunately, most of the issues I had with that title cropped up here too.
Obviously Exit 8 can have some credit over Stairway for (as far as I'm aware) coming up with this concept for a game. And on paper yeah, this sounds like an absolutely fascinating concept. At its best this instills perhaps the best sense of paranoia I've felt while playing a game; I nearly jumped out of my skin at one or two of the anomalies, not because anything particularly scary or loud had happened, but just because something different had happened. The amount this game forces you to focus on its nearly empty environment does do wonders for immersion.
But honestly; the two emotions I felt most strongly during this were frustration and boredom. At the end of the day this is just an elaborate spot the difference puzzle really. You have to get 8 rooms in a row to win the game; I managed to hit seven in a row 4 or 5 times before finally getting a win, and each of those times felt absolutely awful when I turned the corner to see I'd reset my streak yet again.
The anomalies here are much better than in Stairway though, I would say. While Stairway was a memorization game (with anomalies such as which way the lift was going, whether a name was on a coffee cup, etc), Exit 8 is much more about being observant. Basically the anomalies in Exit 8 are all weird. Some of them are still quite subtle and difficult to see, but I never found one and then had to work out whether it actually was an anomaly or not. I think this approach is still much better than in Stairway but yeah... it's still reeeeaaally boring.
So yeah. Great concept on paper and I'm glad it's an experiment that someone was willing to try (and a million people were willing to make copies of apparently). But this microgenre definitely isn't for me, and I think I can be done with it now.
Obviously Exit 8 can have some credit over Stairway for (as far as I'm aware) coming up with this concept for a game. And on paper yeah, this sounds like an absolutely fascinating concept. At its best this instills perhaps the best sense of paranoia I've felt while playing a game; I nearly jumped out of my skin at one or two of the anomalies, not because anything particularly scary or loud had happened, but just because something different had happened. The amount this game forces you to focus on its nearly empty environment does do wonders for immersion.
But honestly; the two emotions I felt most strongly during this were frustration and boredom. At the end of the day this is just an elaborate spot the difference puzzle really. You have to get 8 rooms in a row to win the game; I managed to hit seven in a row 4 or 5 times before finally getting a win, and each of those times felt absolutely awful when I turned the corner to see I'd reset my streak yet again.
The anomalies here are much better than in Stairway though, I would say. While Stairway was a memorization game (with anomalies such as which way the lift was going, whether a name was on a coffee cup, etc), Exit 8 is much more about being observant. Basically the anomalies in Exit 8 are all weird. Some of them are still quite subtle and difficult to see, but I never found one and then had to work out whether it actually was an anomaly or not. I think this approach is still much better than in Stairway but yeah... it's still reeeeaaally boring.
So yeah. Great concept on paper and I'm glad it's an experiment that someone was willing to try (and a million people were willing to make copies of apparently). But this microgenre definitely isn't for me, and I think I can be done with it now.