Recently, I took a trip to the outskirts of Tokyo to escape the heat and unplug for a few hours. Under the vast canopy within the forest of Mount Takao, a mountain deity located on the western outskirts of Tokyo, I walked under almost complete darkness. A few hours later, I made my way underground into the Tokyo metro. Covered and with no celestial body to illuminate my way, yet lit artificially with human ingenuity, I realized how the underground was much brighter than the outdoor expanse of Mount Takao.
The game The Exit 8, developed by KOTAKE CREATE – recently ported to the Nintendo Switch by Playism – transported me back to the bright Tokyo underground. In The Exit 8, the underground hallways of the Tokyo Metro are the labyrinthine setting for this horror puzzle game. It’s advertised as “inspired by Japanese underground passageways, liminal spaces and back rooms”. The word liminal is key. In the game, you traverse through an uncanny space toward the exit and, eventually, the outside world. Where is your destination? You don’t even know. All that matters is to get out. Escape the underground with your wits or be doomed to wander forever the depths of an absurdly clean Japanese metro station.
In The Exit 8—yes, this awkward title is the official English name of the game—you follow signs and keep left on your way to the exit. The Exit 8 is at its core a spot the difference game. It’s essential for the player to identify slight differences in the hallway, some of which are horrifically obvious, and others require a little more attention. As you walk down the same corridor repeatedly, you grow accustomed to the signs, posters, and even the light fixtures.
In my experience, in five minutes of traversing through the hallway, I crossed its entirety over 50 times (this might be a conservative count). So, let’s say that one gets to know the passageway intimately. Eventually, it will be difficult to overlook any anomalies even if you try due to the familiarity one develops. When you find an anomaly, turn back immediately and begin traversing anew. Otherwise, you will be stuck in an infinite loop.
The Exit 8 is as much about playing it as it’s about spectating. Individual experiences with the game work in tandem with the reactions of a spectating audience. The game, thus, is a stage, a performance. When observing others play, the core of the enjoyment derived from the game surfaces. Not to spoil it too much, I’ll say that jump scares and disorienting music are involved. One can technically finish the game in about ten minutes. Continued play depends on whether you want to see all the anomalies.
The Exit 8 is an ethereal experience that is best enjoyed with others. Playing it arose a question that, as a critic, I go out of my way not to address: should I enjoy something less or even find it a worthwhile time sink if the experience is over in a figurative blink of an eye? This gets to the heart of how we engage with art and media more broadly. Consumers spend less on video games, films, and similar entertainment than we used to. Still, we have certain expectations of what we hope to receive from the transaction.
Increasingly, we subscribe to services like Xbox Game Pass or Spotify to listen to music or play games instead of single purchase buys. However, much of our engagement with media is done on social media, where we don’t pay for it directly, and much is available at no extra cost. Art like this – no matter how difficult the process of creating or how expertly crafted it is produced – is and will continue to be forgotten and disposed of. For many consumers, we can only properly engage with such creations for no longer than a few seconds or while splitting our attention. Gotta post it on Instagram, you know. KOTAKE CREATE is aware of this. Hence, The Exit 8’s short playtime.
The sheer volume of media at our disposal is like the passageway in The Exit 8 – seemingly infinite. The game’s linearity and short length are part of its meme. It is popular among streamers, and some playthrough videos have garnered millions of views. A virtual reality version of the game will be released later this year. A sequel, Platform 8, changes the setting to the inside of an infinite train.
The Exit 8 might be the first game I play, which is perfectly content with its transience; its meme-ness, if you will. It exists just for a moment. It’s unlike the infamous Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima collaboration P.T., whose raison d’être was to serve as a tech demo and inspire hype for the creators’ future project (which never came to fruition). There is no hype about The Exit 8, maybe at best, only similar experiences to entertain for a short while and make some money. It wholeheartedly embraces gimmicks. Look to The Exit 8 for an example of peak capitalist art, or if you prefer, content farm. Just watch the countless million-plus viewed videos of people playing the game on YouTube or Twitch for the final word.
Let me give the final word to art historian Claire Bishop by quoting her book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024). “Memes and the viral have put a new model of engaged looking into circulation, predicated on quantity and speed rather than narrowness and depth.” When applied to The Exit 8, this view is ironic since the game follows Bishop’s new model of engagement, yet its setting is the narrowness and depths of the Tokyo Metro. The Exit 8 exists in an interregnum where one might ask, what the fuck is art?