The Exit 8 has opened the new subgenre of horror games, which I would dub as Exit 8-like. These new indie horror games share the same gameplay principle: a. the player is in a looping environment, b. if there is an anomaly (e.g. jump scares, out of place objects, etc.), act according to the game’s manual, c. the anomalies are often unsettling changes to otherwise normal, day-to-day environment. One could argue this is a take on Papers, Please but with horror and 3D graphics. And I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment; 3D assets are easily available on the store front, and following the rules of Exit 8 makes it possible to create an indie game at affordable price.

Keeping things under budget doesn’t automatically translate to easy to create knockoffs. There are, at least four pillars of Exit 8 that need to be balanced out before a game can be shipped out. First, the anomalies will be sole source of gameplay, thereby it must be unsettling enough to be eerie, but not standing out enough to make the game too easy. Second, the randomness of these anomalies can’t be completely random. If a game were to send out hard to spot anomalies with no horror contexts (e.g. a poster is hanging on a different wall, instead of a poster flying towards a player) in 8 consecutive turns, most players would be put off to play the rest of the anomalies. Third, by controlling the anomalies and randomness of their occurrences, the game has to deliver some lores, or at least coherent atmosphere. If the game breaks the rules too often, it will quickly turn into a walking simulator with random events. And last but not least, smooth transitions from stages to stages, or in other words, optimize the game to streamline the experience to give the game polished experience.

As soon as I started playing around with Exit 8-likes, one notable thing I noticed was that many of them fail on the fourth, the smooth transition. The game stutter heavily while the next stage is being prepped, or require unusually high hardware specs to run an indie game, or use more system resources than CPU-intensive simulation games. The original the Exit 8 kept the stage in relatively small hallway. Whereas now all the Exit 8-likes that are flooding the market want to have bigger stages — a flat, or even as big as a cabin. They do offer more in return, just not enough to make it worth it. Imagine having to explain you need a latest graphics card to play an indie horror in 4k priced at $2.99. Hopefully, a new rig isn’t going anywhere after a single review. It’s just a question sitting at the back of my mind — aren’t we accepting better asset flips as a subgenre?