In such a competitive market, just making a good game isn’t good enough anymore. Every game has to find a way to stand out from the crowd and draw attention away from all the other great games out there, and for many, the solution is social media virality. Twitch and YouTube have been instrumental in the success of many games that would otherwise have flown under the radar. You only need to look at Among Us, which languished on Steam for two years until Twitch streamers found it during the pandemic and made it a massive hit. Games like QWOP, Dark Souls, Undertale, Untitled Goose Game, and Helldivers 2 are successful in part because they’re so memeable. The longer a game lives on social media the longer it remains in the zeitgeist, and the more successful it becomes.
Over the last couple of years, TikTok has become the focal point of online culture, and everyone who markets games has been frantically trying to figure out how to show off their games in a way that appeals to the TikTok generation. Larian’s creative content direction Ben Maltz-Jones found a lot of success for Baldur’s Gate 3 by leaning into popular TikTok trends, and games like Lethal Company, Only Up, and My Singing Monsters have benefited a lot from TikTok virality, but the game that most owes its success to TikTok is a micro-horror game called The Exit 8. Whether intentional or not, everything about Exit 8 is made for TikTok, and it probably wouldn’t have found the same success without it.
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The Exit 8 is like any number of back room-inspired micro-horror games you may have seen on Itch.io over the years. It’s a no-budget game that uses familiar assets, has no story, and can be completed in just a few minutes. All you do is walk silently through the underground in an attempt to find Exit 8 and escape. Unfortunately, the tunnel loops around on itself PT-style, so the only way to escape is to learn how to recognize a series of anomalies that signify when you need to turn around and go back the way you came, rather than proceed down the hallway and loop again.
The anomalies are often subtle. Sometimes you’ll enter the tunnel and find a pile of No Smoking signs on the floor or a man running at you, but usually you’re expected to notice a door knob that is out of place, or a poster that slowly grows bigger as you get closer to it. If you notice an anomaly you have to turn around immediately and re-enter the hallway from the opposite direction (it loops at both ends, unsettlingly). If you correctly identify an anomaly (or the lack of one) eight times, you’ll find the exit and finish the game.
It’s lonely, haunting, and extremely uncomfortable to play, but that describes the entire micro-horror genre too. What makes The Exit 8 standout is how perfectly it fits TikTok’s sensibilities. The simple, easily explainable premise, the short gameplay loop, and the way its liminal spaces grab your attention immediately all help videos of The Exit 8 perform well. Even the design of the long, narrow hallway with its one-point perspective is ideal for TikTok’s vertical format.
There’s so much you can squeeze out of this game, far more than you’d expect. My first exposure to The Exit 8 on TikTok came from its speedrunning community. The current speedrun record is one minute, nine seconds – the perfect length for a TikTok. I’ve seen TikToks about the lore, clips that give tips and tricks on identifying all the anomalies, memes about the game’s more idiosyncratic elements, and general gameplay of streamers reacting to the jump scares. There’s barely enough here for a YouTube video and few Twitch streamers outside of the micro-horror fan base would spend time on this, but it’s exactly the right kind of game for TikTok virality.
The Exit 8 has earned tens of millions of views on TikTok in the last few months, paving the way for a Nintendo Switch launch this week. It’s hard to imagine a game like this breaking out of itch.io containment without the help of TikTok, and I expect developers will take notice of its success and try to find ways to make their games more TikTok friendly. It might not be a cultural phenomenon like Among Us, but The Exit 8 proves that games can’t ignore the power of TikTok.
