Platform 8 Review

Horror games are at their best when they truly embrace the medium’s interactive nature. It’s one thing to watch a scary movie, but it’s an entirely different experience when you, as the player, must commit to all the classic and cliche actions in horror games. You have to open the door and walk down that hallway, and when you do, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. Exit 8 and its sequel, Platform 8, demonstrate a strong understanding of the fun that can be had in the interactive horror space, even if the latter offers a less inspired and uneven experience.

2023’s Exit 8 was a fun surprise. Taking elements from PT and hidden-object adventure games and mixing them into a short but sweet first-person psychological horror adventure game. The game was simple: you’re in a train station and trying to get out. The gameplay involved you walking through a repeating hallway through the station while observing your environment, looking for anomalies.

When an anomaly was detected, you walked back the way you came until the hallway looped back, and the environment had effectively reset itself. You repeated this process, walking down the same hallway looking for different anomalies until you had safely walked down or successfully noticed and avoided anomalies eight times, and then the exit would open, and the game would end.

Anomalies could be anything from a once-still door slowly creaking open to a rush of water roaring towards you. The unexpected nature of the anomalies helped keep you on your toes, forcing you to constantly poke at the environment, looking for the next scare. Exit 8 had a healthy variety of anomalies, which helped make multiple game runs feel fresh and exciting despite being a short experience.

Why am I spending all this time talking about Exit 8 in my review for Platform 8? Platform 8 doesn’t change much besides swapping the train station setting for a moving train, introducing new anomalies, and nothing else. The change in scenery hinders the gameplay experience by limiting your puzzle-solving options. In Platform 8 your objective is to navigate through the moving train car detecting anomalies. One fundamental change in Platform 8 is you need to detect eight anomalies to unlock the exit successfully. Simply moving through a safe train car does not contribute to your progress.

Unlike Exit 8 you can not walk backwards until the level resets as the train car behind you is always locked. But Platform 8 does giveth as much as it taketh by allowing you to sit in the seats on the moving train. Sitting was a mechanic I do not recall having a single use for during my 80-minute runtime, during which I found two of the three endings in the game.

It would be all fun and good if the seemingly claustrophobic nature of a moving train cart added much to the game, but often, it felt like the environment was getting in the way of the puzzles and the horror. Too frequently, I solved puzzles by simply not doing anything, waiting for the anomaly to pass by or walking without directly looking at the anomaly to avoid eye contact. Platform 8 feels too much like a passive game, which is appropriate given the game’s setting but does not make playing it that much fun.