To celebrate the newly released movie adaptation of The Exit 8, the Switch version has received a minor, yet welcome upgrade for the Switch 2.

If you're unaware of the premise, The Exit 8 takes place in a looping corridor within a Japanese metro station. Your job is to escape, but to do so, you’ll need to keep an eye on your surroundings, as each loop through the corridor may reveal some odd ‘anomalies’.

If there aren't any anomalies, you simply carry on, but if you spot something out of the ordinary, then you’ll have to turn back. You need to make the correct decision eight times in a row to escape, with a yellow sign indicating which ‘level’ you’re currently at. So if you get it wrong, you’ll reset right back down to zero.

The corridor itself is covered with white tiles, with posters on the left, a few doors on the right, and a sign up above labelled ‘Exit 8’. In each loop, you’ll spot a man walking in the opposite direction — briefcase in one hand, phone in the other. It’s important to keep note of small details like this, as potential anomalies are either blatantly obvious or exceedingly difficult to spot.

Some of the more subtle anomalies might be rearranged posters, a flickering light, or a door left slightly ajar. Meanwhile, the more obvious ones may be a pair of figures blocking your way, the briefcase man suddenly following you very closely, or what I can only assume is blood flooding the corridor. New anomalies have been added to pay homage to the movie, but unless you're intimately familiar with the original, you might not pick up on these.

Not knowing what's around the corner is a large part of what makes The Exit 8 so engaging, but it's also a source of frustration. There were many times I walked through the corridor utterly convinced that nothing had changed, only to find was back at level zero. So you need to take your time and be consistently observant.

On the Switch 2, the game’s performance has been given a nice bump, and it feels like it’s running at a stable 60fps. I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly pretty game, though, and the overall presentation is a little fuzzy in handheld mode, with text on the in-game posters looking quite blurry unless you’re standing right next to them.

I would've liked to see gyro aiming here too, just to make observation a little more intuitive, but the standard twin-stick setup works well enough. It’s such a simple game that every face and shoulder button does the exact same thing: sprint.

Overall, The Exit 8 is a cool experience that's worth trying for the low price, but not one I imagine going back to anytime soon. I wouldn’t call it scary, but there are definitely moments that made me feel uneasy. I think if the developer had really leaned into the horror and made something a bit closer to Hideo Kojima’s P.T., we could have had a modern classic here.

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