[Chilla's Art] Shinkansen 0 | 新幹線 0号

While I do think this game is worth playing if you like The Exit 8 as a subgenre, one design decision feels like a fundamental flaw to me. I did not find it fun to have 80 or 100 forward-facing seats and 40 windows to check in every car. It made me impatient when I had run up and down the aisle four or five times and hadn't spotted anything. That leaves the game with one way, in my opinion, to handle the difficulty of looking around the car. The anomalies have to be particularly rewarding to spot, either because they are very clever or very scary. Goofy Exit 8 copycats like Midnight Monitor: Aldercourt pull this off by being generally funny or face-palm inducing. Scary ones like The Stairway 7 do it by making your hair stand up when you see the change. This game only pulls that off enough times to push you to finish the story. To its credit, there are two endings that aren't hard to reach: the you-beat-the-game ending and the you-finished-the-story ending. Then if you want to 100% the anomalies, the phone in the space between cars will tell you how many remain. And the game does a decent job of mixing new anomalies in with a few repeats you already spotted. But in the end, be prepared to find yourself sometimes just guessing correctly that something changed even though you never spotted it. The game doesn't know if you, the player, really saw the anomaly or not, and will give you credit just for choosing that there was one. Having just completed four other games in this style, I have to emphasize that only this one had me cheesing my way through some of the anomalies like that. Can't be what the developer intended.