A new liminal horror game has players trying to escape an endless Japanese subway
The Exit 8 is based on viral horror trend The Backrooms
A new indie horror game has players trying to escape an endless Japanese subway station.
The Exit 8 is developed by Japanese indie studio Kotake Create, and is set to be released on Steam later this month.
The game places players in an underground passageway and tasks them with escaping.
However, as players progress, the corridors appear to repeat themselves – similar to the now delisted Silent Hills ‘PT’ demo – as does the passenger who continually walks past the player.
According to the game’s description, players have to “take a good look around” and try to figure out how to get out of the endless loop.
“Don’t overlook any anomalies,” the description says. “If you find anomalies, turn around immediately. If you don’t find anomalies, do not turn back. To go out from Exit 8.”
Kotake Create says the game is “a short walking simulator inspired by Japanese underground passageways, liminal spaces and back rooms”.
The Exit 8 is the latest game to take inspiration from the Backrooms, a viral online trend which started on controversial forum 4chan and expanded to the wider internet community.
In the most commonly used version of the trend, the Backrooms are a maze of empty rooms which can only be found when a person finds a gap in reality and ‘noclips’ through it (similar to a player accidentally passing through a wall in a video game).
The Backrooms make use of the idea of ‘liminal spaces’, an aesthetic which revolves around eerily empty rooms and spaces, particularly those that are usually found to be busy in real life (such as offices or, in this case, subway stations).
