The Exit 8 is an indie game developed by Kotake Create and released on Steam on 29 November 2023. The player walks a Japanese metro passageway looking for inaccuracies in its layout — “anomalies” — in order to reach the exit. The rules are posted on a sign on the wall: if there is no anomaly, keep going; if there is one, turn back the way you came. Be right eight times in a row and you reach Exit 8; be wrong once and you are sent back to Exit 0.
Each time the player leaves, the passage repeats, seemingly forever, with even a passer-by appearing caught in the loop. Anomalies range from the subtle — a changed sign, a repeating poster, a passer-by in the wrong proportions — to the obvious, like a power outage or a flood of red water. The developer drew on the “surreal” atmosphere of underground passageways, the concept of liminal spaces, and the Finnish horror series I’m on Observation Duty, and modelled the setting on stations including one in Osaka and Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station in Kōtō, Tokyo.
Made in nine months on a low budget, it passed two million downloads and won at both the Japan Game Awards and the CEDEC Awards. Its imitators came to be called “Exit 8-likes,” and a live-action film adaptation opened in Japan in 2025.