A few years ago, I played and enjoyed the anomaly game, The Exit 8, and its follow-up, Platform 8. Although I haven’t sought out these kinds of games, I still find the genre interesting. Recently, a similar series, 8:AM, offered its first game for free for everyone on Steam. I picked it up and quickly played it. While I enjoyed its concept, this is a fairly weak game.
Watching over a quiet house
The concept behind 8:AM is that your character is doing a security detail for a family. You’re in a strange room, watching footage of their massive estate. Like other anomaly games, your goal is to look at the footage to find anything strange. This happens over the course of eight hours. Get it correct, and you move to the next hour of the night. Get it wrong, and you begin again. Once you reach 8 am, you’re free to go.
There are 16 cameras that you need to examine to find said anomalies. While most cover different parts of the house, a few watch the same room but from different angles. Due to the game’s small budget, the anomalies are basic. You’ll never see anything move the screen, so the key is to notice anything out of place.
Because of that, this is a pretty easy game. When I played The Exit 8, it took me a while to figure out the strange behaviour because some of the clues are easy to miss. Or, they happen without warning, so you might assume nothing is wrong. Here, if you notice a person in a frame, then you know there is a problem. Most of the strange things here are people standing motionless in rooms they shouldn’t be in. Or, a family member is missing from their bed. There was only one instance where a sound effect indicated something was wrong.
A bit too easy
Because of the lack of difficulty, you can finish a run in about 10-15 minutes. The only part I found difficult was the start of the game. You start in a dark room, and my camera was facing in a direction where I only saw black. I thought there was something wrong with the game until I started moving the cursor around. It was only then that I saw the desk I was working from.
Otherwise, the strange things you see are very obvious. I can’t remember coming across one that offered a challenge. Most of them involve a person, so because they stand out, it’s hard to miss. Once you spot them, you exit the camera footage, select that something is wrong, and move on to the next hour.
There is a “jumpscare” option, but this doesn’t change the experience too much. In most cases, people will not even bother to toggle this on or off. When you finish a run, it states that there are 164 strange things. In the three runs I completed, I only “encountered” 21 of them. Other than a steam achievement, there is no incentive to go out of your way to see them all.
Nothing more than a Proof of Concept
8:AM first came out back in 2024, around the same time as The Exit 8. Since then, the developer has followed this up with a few more variations. On top of that, there are at least three more planned for release through the rest of 2026. So, giving this first game away for free is smart if it manages to gain new followers. But this is a weak first entry, and there isn’t enough here to make it stand out or warrant exploring further. If they offer this again for free or at an incredible discount, consider it. Otherwise, play the better anomaly games that are out there.
