Game EXP: 8AM (VSD)

8AM
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: March 28, 2024
Publisher: HeadArrow
Developer: David Gallardo
Time Spent: 36 Minutes
Gameplay Video on YouTube

8AM is a simplistic "spot the difference" game where you scroll through 16 different cameras in a house over the course of a single evening.  You play as a person remotely viewing security cameras at an affluent house, and if you spot something out of place, you exit out of the computer and select the "Yes" post-it note.  If you don't see any anomalies or anything out of the ordinary, you select the "No" post-it note.  If you were correct in your decision, you move on to the next hour, otherwise you start back at midnight, 00:00 if you're wrong.  You have until 8:00 AM to complete your shift, where you then leave through the brightly lit exit behind your computer station.

During my first playthrough, I experienced five strange things, all involving the three members of the family I was watching, which led me to believe that if I saw everyone sleeping in their respective beds, then there wouldn't be any anomalies.  On subsequent playthroughs, there was an instance when everyone was still in their beds, but the backyard patio was populated by 13 business professionals just standing, looking at the house.  At another time, there was a rocking chair that was moving on its own, which was coincidentally the only time I saw anything moving.  In another camera, there was a single man standing out in the backyard.  Any time people were out of their beds, they would only be stationary, just standing around like Katie staring at her husband Micah in Paranormal Activity.

When playing, I pressed the "Jump Scares" button, which generates randomly selected creepy things to jump out and scream at you after you log out of the computer.  Vampire-like faces hiding under the desk.  A ghost resting on your keyboard waiting for you to look up at it.  Several jump scares happened before I could actually register what I was supposed to be looking at, and all I heard was the lingering scream fading in the distance.  I don't know if there's supposed to be any continuity between the entities that scare you at the computer and what's happening to the family in their house.  In one way, it feels like this mechanic is supposed to make the game a lot more tense than it actually is.  While it might be slightly disturbing seeing an adult staring blankly at a wall while standing over a sleeping child, it's not scary in the same way that having an entity scream at you in an otherwise empty and quiet room.  But it's a button you can toggle on/off, so it's not a key mechanic of the game.

It genuinely doesn't feel like beating the game by making it to 8:00 AM is the point.  Had it been, I would have only played for 14 minutes, although I started looking through rooms even after seeing something strange, so I could try to commit to memory what rooms looked like in their default setup.  My final playthrough only took me 5 minutes 22 seconds.  I'm sure that if I wanted to speedrun it, I could probably make it to 8:00 AM in just over a minute.  After completing each shift, you're told how many total anomalies, referred to as "stranger things," you've seen out of 164.  Of the four playthroughs, I didn't see any repeat anomalies, so I assume that after you see one and claim to see it, it's taken out of the queue.  While I am mildly interested in seeing what possibly counts as an anomaly outside of people standing around at 4 o'clock in the morning, I'm not so invested as to spend hours finding all 164 stranger things.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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