Keep calm and escape a dodgy elevator in this cursed Exit 8-like 

Today, indie developer Half/Phai released their own take on The Exit 8 genre with 0^th Floor -The cursed elevator to Floor 0-. The creepy title has you escaping from a malfunctioning elevator, while looking out for anomalies on each floor and avoiding attacks. The game is playable in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. 

Kotake Create’s The Exit 8, released on Steam last November, was such a breakout hit that it has since inspired many developers to make their own games based on the unnerving anomaly-spotting walking sim. These have ranged from outright copycats (The Exit 9) to games that try to put their own spin on the combination of anomaly-spotting gameplay, creepy liminal spaces and numbered places (see Shinkansen 0, Track no. 9, and many more). As a side note, Kotake Create recently announced an official sequel to the game that has launched this emerging subgenre (Related Article). 

Now back to 0^th Floor. As its full title suggests, the game is set inside an elevator that has a weird malfunction that causes it to go to floor 0. To prevent this from happening and successfully make your escape via the 1^st floor, you must travel to different levels of the building in the exact order listed on a notice inside the dodgy elevator.   

Press the number for the next floor in the sequence and then wait for the elevator doors to open. If you have arrived on the correct floor, you can breathe a sigh of relief and wait for the doors to close automatically. However, if you see something strange on the floor that you arrived on, you must quickly close the doors yourself.  

Sounds simple enough right? However, you may be unlucky enough to find yourself on a floor where the room is illuminated in red. Even if your first instinct is to close the doors and move safely to another floor, you must instead wait until you are in grave danger and then shut the door. Therefore, 0^th Floor requires the player to keep a cool head. You must remember the sequence of floors, be observant and not panic when you are about to be attacked by “It!” 

Like The Exit 8, 0^th Floor also seems to be set in Japan, with your elevator moving between various businesses and locations, including a subway station platform, an underground carpark, a store and some restaurant kitchens. The elevator floor announcements are also spoken in Japanese. According to the game’s Steam page, a single playthrough will last around 10 to 60 minutes, but it will take completionists 3 to 6 hours to find all the game’s anomalies. 

0^th Floor was released on April 4 for PC (Steam). It is available at a 15% discount until April 18, 2024.