Encountering new styles of play is always somewhat fascinating. It’s absolutely thrilling to experience something fun that you’ve never played before, with great examples like loading up Quake or Mario 64 for the first time coming to mind. Then there are those experiences where you’ll instead walk away hoping to never run into anything quite like it again. 

I felt that way when I played The Exit 8 for the first time, spending the first few minutes simply trying to understand what the hell I was even supposed to be doing in the first place. Only after looking it up did I discover that its gameplay merely centered around walking through the same environment with the same details over and over, hoping to spot anomalies which would sometimes be very simple (and often dumb), or sometimes even creepy in some way. Honestly, the fact that this would be considered fun, and not just an excuse to invest as little effort in development as possible, baffled me and I hoped it would just be an anomaly somehow.

Unfortunately now with Project 13 I’m sensing it may be here to stay, and I’m no more convinced in that being a good thing now having seen a second example of it in action. You’ll simply walk around a small taxidermy museum, observing a number of pretty ordinary exhibits with a variety of animals, encountering a creepy old dude who’ll walk around behind you, an old lady at the ticket counter, and a few other strange odds and ends. Then you’ll walk through it again, trying your best to find anything that happens to be different, pulling the lever at the end if you believe you did, and hoping you were right so you can keep proceeding. If you’re wrong, you’ll start over again, with your ultimate goal to reach the 13th iteration, never being mistaken in the current run whether it was normal or not. Of course none of this is conveyed to the player or shared within the game, you’ll need to look it up, already getting off to a poor start.

Worse, more often than not it feels like the anomalies I did encounter didn’t tend to do much to hide themselves. The more odd or creepy ones instead felt determined to point themselves out to you, lest the effort behind setting them up would be missed. This made the game’s design feel at odds with itself. Is it just a vehicle for having people walk around over and over looking for the thrill or WTF moments that could pop up periodically, or is it about subtle differences being included to test people’s perceptions? Regardless, yet again I’m mostly underwhelmed by the lack of effort behind this style of game as the majority of the time you’re just walking through the same area with all of the same assets and details. Even attempting to keep an open mind and understand that it may not be a style of game made for me, I’d simply like to see some genuine and earnest effort to make this style of play work well, not just feel thrown together seemingly as a cash grab.