2023 saw the pivotal landmark in indie horror The Exit 8 release on Steam: a Japanese ‘walking simulator’ horror developed by one man known as KOTAKE CREATE, in which the player must journey through the superliminal halls of a metro station and notice anomalies in the labyrinthine design to escape to the surface. Expertly, intentionally simple, the game feels like it’s invading your mind palace with constant doubts, anxieties and “Was this always there?” as you descend into some urban-born madness amid the pearly white tiles of these endless passageways.
This indie horror title essentially spawned a new genre of anomaly-hunting, typically low-budget (and eye-wateringly low-price) games. But so simple a concept doesn’t sound like it would make for all that interesting of a feature film, even in an era where indie game upstarts are taking the silver screen hostage, and the announcement of an adaptation left fans hesitant as to whether this would be a worthwhile venture. How could the film capture the player’s placebo-effect stress, constantly believing themselves to be witnessing an anomalous result that was never there?
Little did we know that Exit 8 — the shortened name for this to-the-big-screen transmutation — would land as perhaps the most faithful and expansive video-game adaptation we’ve ever seen; from the first ten minutes of an eye-catchingly haunting and anticipatory first-person long-take, to the eponymous purgatory halls looking as if they are a CTRL+C; CTRL+V import from Steam, if with a little more gloss. Any changes to the layout of these mind-chambers only serve to improve, ingeniously utilising Möbius Strip II (Red Ants) by M.C. Escher as the film’s literal poster, as well as one of the posters in the metro.
This choice reflects a wider turn and a spark of genius made by this adaptation from the Your Name producer Genki Kawamura. The game is very clearly, well, a game, insofar as it doesn’t attempt to be anything else; fun, scary, straightfoward (literally), and it’s over. The film synthesises this deliberate simplicity with a transformation, turning the luminescent, lemon-yellow iconography of the halls into more of a warning sign, or a welcome into purgatory. In other words, it’s the classic ‘indie horror becomes existential metaphor’ we all know and love.
The ‘Exit 8’ of the cinema is a psychological test, a confrontation with your worst fears, and a superliminal nightmare. We follow a weak, politely fragile temp-job worker simply known to us as ‘The Lost Man’. Of course he’s physically lost, onlooking the same dentist advertisements and subway behaviour guides ad nauseam, but the most anomalous thing on his journey is what hangs in the balance outside. His ex-girlfriend informs him that she is pregnant, and is unsure whether to keep it. “So, which is it?” She repeats throughout the film, unbeknownst to us if it is said diegetically or simply in the mind of this lost soul.
It will soon become clear to the ostensibly doomed man — barely keeping himself together amid the umpteenth asthma attack, trip or water shortage — that this boundless hell is a rite of passage. As said, the most anomalous thing in his journey is his new-found possibility of being a father: should he turn back and escape it, following the rules of the test, or should he run forward into acceptance? In some respect, Exit 8 kind of becomes a Japanese, urban-horror Arrival (in my eyes, anyway) as a man comes to terms with his future beyond the halls.
The most masterful decision of Kawamura’s here is how Exit 8 becomes a triptych. ‘The Lost Man’ is not our only voice, nor is it our only perspective on the matter. The ceaseless tiling, max-intensity lighting and yellow striking of the tunnels means something different to everybody, on-screen or off: a test on fatherhood; an escape from the droning cog-turning of the capitalist engine, if only to be stuck in another; a chance to be born. Just as it is interpretative for our characters, we must draw our own decodings from near-unanswerable questions, magnifying such a simple game into a 90-minute philosophical examination stuck inside this technofeudalist infinity.
With that, Exit 8 justifies itself as a must-see contemplation on the big screen. It’s got the scares to make you shake, all the while giving you something fascinating to think about, a gift from a clearly dexterous mind. It’s honestly a flex in this age of game-adaptation-mania to craft what is equal parts an expert, almost mimeographic replica and an impressive, boundary-breaking amplification of the blueprint. A game adaptation that doesn’t just make you more thankful for the original in a ‘be thankful for what you have’ sort of way, but one that brings new ideas to the forefront of The Exit 8 as a psychological, trans-medium concept, and makes the game all the better for it.
