'Exit 8' is an Exceptional Liminal Thriller and the Best Video Game Adaptation Ever Made [Cannes 2025 Review]

I've long been fascinated by what I call No Exit Horror , a term I've coined for a sub-genre rooted in existential dread, where characters are trapped in singular, oppressive spaces they cannot escape. Think of such liminal space thrillers as Cube , Dead End , Pontypool , or even The Shining . I took the name from French writer/philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, of course, and like his play No Exit , these films trap their characters not just in rooms but in loops of self-denial, regret, or moral indecision.
Genki Kawamura's masterful Exit 8 , which just had its eerie and unforgettable premiere in the Cannes Midnight Screenings section, uses this trope so effectively that it might just be the most exceptional video game adaptation ever made.
Adapted from a cult Japanese video game, Exit 8 follows 'The Lost Man,' played with raw and adorable restraint by Kazunari Ninomiya ( Letters from Iwo Jima , Gantz ). On a tedious underground commute home from his desk job, he quickly finds himself trapped in an endless underground subway corridor, forced to detect subtle anomalies, glitches in reality, that signal whether it's safe to proceed to the next exit, aka level.
He loops back to the beginning if he misses something out of place. It's the perfect metaphor for the paralysis of modern professional life, trapped in the endless maze designed by the evils of capitalism: the hallway, sterile and endless, is less a location than a state of mind. He is, quite literally, going nowhere. And I'm sure most of us can find it relatable on some level .
Exit 8 is more than just a stylish horror experiment or the astute staging of a unique and inexpensive IP. It's a tragic and intimate character study following a broken hero's journey where the monster isn't lurking around a corner. The Lost Man is on his way home from a job he clearly loathes. He's exhausted, emotionally disconnected, and stuck in the passive inertia of a life he never truly chose. And then, suddenly, fatherhood looms. Read More BioWare restructures around Mass Effect
The great twist of Exit 8 is that its horror and drama are mostly emotional, not supernatural or sci-fi. Kawamura has crafted a film about the terror of becoming a parent before you're ready. About accepting love when you're not sure you're worthy. The anomaly in this man's life isn't a shadowy figure or an off-kilter passageway. Instead, it's the terrifying prospect of loving someone more than yourself. And being loved in return. The hallway becomes purgatory for a man who can't admit he's scared—scared of responsibility, commitment, and growing up.
Ninomiya's performance is essential here. It's not flashy, but it's deep. He expertly plays emotional numbness, with shoulders sloped under decades of unspoken guilt and generational/gender expectation. There's a quiet beauty in how little he says and how much he shows. When change finally comes, it's not triumphant. It's terrifying. And it's earned.
As The Lost Man repeats the corridor again and again, each loop becomes a step along a fractured, nonlinear path toward emotional accountability. He isn't trying to escape. He's trying to accept. He's trying to become someone capable of being loved, and of loving in return. And that might be the scariest journey a horror movie has ever asked of a man. And he's not alone. The eerie and quick introduction of 'The Walking Man' is frightening, then tragic. A perfect side quest during an already pristine mainline story.
The atmosphere in Exit 8 draws on a similar liminal energy felt in brilliant liminal horror projects like P.T. and The Backrooms, but where those stories revel in abstract terror, Kawamura's film weaponises drama and character study with a teaspoon of hope. Ultimately, there isn't a clear resolution. But it does provide reflection. It asks what happens to those of us who live on autopilot. Those who accept careers we hate, relationships we don't nurture, and the futures we never chose. It's about how modern men inherit silence and mistake it for strength. And how love … real, scary, adult love … demands presence and vulnerability. It demands that you exit the loop.
With Exit 8 , Genki Kawamura has crafted a haunting cautionary tale for the emotionally paralysed. It's a masterpiece of 'No Exit Horror': intimate, tragic, and impressively human. Forget boss battles, this is a video game adaptation where the final level is fatherhood, and like the process of being born, the only way out is through.
Summary
Genki Kawamura's masterful 'Exit 8' expertly draws on a liminal horror, character study, and realist drama to craft the best video game adaptation of all time.
Tags: Cannes 2025 Exit 8 Featured Post Genki Kawamura
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Los Angeles Times

a day ago

• Los Angeles Times

Inside the ‘Dragon Age' debacle that gutted EA's BioWare Studio

In early November, on the eve of the holiday shopping season, staffers at the video game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard,' and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video game publisher Electronic Arts had been under intense pressure. The studio's previous two games, 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' and 'Anthem,' had flopped, and there were rumors that if 'Dragon Age' underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA's many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new 'Dragon Age' had reached only 1.5 million players, missing the company's expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, 'EA Sports FC 25,' was also subpar, compounding the problem. As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson said, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA's share price promptly plunged 18%. ''Dragon Age' had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,' Wilson said on an earnings call. 'However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.' Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare's staff at the studio's headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard,' there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switch that muddled development and inflated the title's budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA's potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment. The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, such as 'Madden NFL,' and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released 'Dragon Age: Inquisition,' the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title won the Game of the Year award and sold 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA's diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next 'Dragon Age' installment, aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio's focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released 'Mass Effect: Andromeda,' the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft's Casey Hudson, an alumnus of BioWare's early, formative years. Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as 'Destiny' and 'Overwatch,' in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into 'Anthem,' a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whiskey. The next 'Dragon Age' sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. 'I wish that pivot had never occurred,' Darrah would later recount on YouTube. 'EA said, 'Make this a live service.' We said, 'We don't know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.'' Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of 'Dragon Age' while everyone else helped to finish 'Anthem,' which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a 'pulpy,' more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series. In February 2019, BioWare released 'Anthem.' Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare's second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of 'Dragon Age' continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would experience only once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn't die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of 'Anthem' hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building ''Anthem' with dragons.' Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game's already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare's new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next 'Dragon Age' would no longer be multiplayer. 'We were thinking, 'Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?'' McKay told Bloomberg News. 'No, we need to get back to what we're really great at.' In theory, the reversion back to the series' tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game's fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they'd be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an 'alpha' build of 'Dragon Age' to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game's biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games. But the multiplayer roots of 'Dragon Age' limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game's release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish game, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next 'Mass Effect.' For decades there'd been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the 'Dragon Age' crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the 'Mass Effect' group was called the USS Enterprise, after the 'Star Trek' ship, because commands were issued straight from the top and executed zealously. As the 'Mass Effect' directors took control, they scoffed that the 'Dragon Age' squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the 'Mass Effect' team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating 'Dragon Age' leaders who had been told they didn't have the budget for such big, ambitious swings. 'It always seemed that, when the 'Mass Effect' team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,' said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the 'Dragon Age' franchise who left before development of the new game started. 'But 'Dragon Age' always had to fight against headwinds.' Early testers and 'Mass Effect' leads complained about the game's snarky tone — a style of video game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman's vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that 'Dragon Age' could face the same outcome as 'Forspoken' — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game's dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game's poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors' strike limited the writers' ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next 'Dragon Age' seem more like 'Fortnite' than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn't know how to market the game. When 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard' finally premiered on Halloween after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game's new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered. 'The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,' said Caitie, a popular 'Dragon Age' YouTuber. 'Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.' Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is working on the next 'Mass Effect.' After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA's commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA's annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits such as 'Cyberpunk 2077,' 'Elden Ring' and 'Baldur's Gate 3.' In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. 'That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn't be totally surprised,' Creutz added. 'It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.' Schreier writes for Bloomberg.

Yahoo

11-06-2025

• Yahoo

When a Nasty Habit Is Part of Your National Identity

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On my first weekend living in Paris, I decided I had to learn how to smoke, and quickly. I sat in the dismal studio apartment I shared with a roommate and lit up Gauloise after Gauloise until my face turned a shade of chartreuse. I was an exchange student in the mid-'90s, and this was the intensity I applied to most activities that held the possibility of transforming me into the person I wanted to be. Parisians smoked, and if I aspired to be a Parisian, which I desperately did, then I would smoke. By the end of the weekend, I could sit in a café with a cigarette dangling from my lips like a shorter, swarthier, coughier Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. When I learned recently that France will soon ban smoking outside—banishing it from under lonely streetlamps and on park benches, where a last puff could be shared between lovers—it seemed that some essential part of French national identity was ending. If you are forbidden from lighting up in almost every social situation, then smoking, mon ami, is effectively illegal. Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald's and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means 'working so hard that you die.' Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq—have their smoking. 'I drank the coffee, and then I wanted a cigarette,' thinks Meursault, the antihero of Albert Camus' novel The Stranger and, after the Little Prince, likely the first French person in literature many students of the country's language will encounter. 'But I wasn't sure if I should smoke, under the circumstances, in Mother's presence'—he's sitting vigil over her dead body. 'I thought it over; really, it didn't seem to matter, so I offered the keeper a cigarette, and we both smoked.' [Read: The allure of smoking rises again] Before I go much further, let me be clear: Cigarettes will kill you. I'm old enough to remember a 13-hour flight during which I experienced the slow asphyxiation of being stuck in the smoking section. The world does occasionally improve, and fewer people dying of lung cancer is certainly one of the ways. But nostalgia does not come with health warnings. What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It's been a while—maybe 20 years—since I've touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing 'Pause.' For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar. These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation's incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country's internet-privacy laws: 'the right to be forgotten.' This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette. Smoking was like a type of punctuation—life's em dash—forcing me to slow down, and putting everything else in relief. Sartre once contemplated quitting (really), but he couldn't bear what that would do to the rest of his existence. 'I used to smoke at the theater, in the morning while working, in the evening after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh animation,' he wrote in Being and Nothingness. 'Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impoverished from the moment that I could not welcome it while smoking.' [Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain's Paris] This is an eloquent description of a severe addiction. Smoking is a disgusting habit, and I don't miss it, not really. But I do worry a bit about France. What Sartre was articulating—a life of enjoyment, of savoring those evening meals and the theater and mornings spent lost in thought—can be hard to come by in our world. Did smoking help those moments materialize out of our otherwise hectic lives? Maybe. For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it's bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning. That Godard-and-Truffaut version of France that I'm pining for was obviously already a thing of the past even when I lived there. And that past is even further in the past now. A little less than a quarter of the country's population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism—the trend line curves downward more dramatically for them. As for the new law, which carries a 135-euro fine, a survey of French people (conducted, I'm imagining, over zinc countertops and demitasses) found that 78 percent said they were happy to be done with cigarettes in public places. Maybe they're tired of the 2 billion butts that collect on the streets of Paris every year. That might convince me. These days, when I'm feeling sentimental, instead of smoking, I'll just mainline a film from the New Wave era, such as Godard's existentialist drama Vivre sa vie. Anna Karina is there, playing Nana, a woman who leaves her husband and becomes a sex worker (strangely, a common storyline in French movies of the period). She is sitting in a café, puffing away. 'I think we're always responsible for our actions,' she says. 'We're free.' Free to do any number of things, she says, dreamily invoking the Sartrean credo as smoke curls around her black bob. She is free to close her eyes, to be unhappy. And she takes responsibility for this. 'I smoke a cigarette,' she says, a mischievous smile on her lips. 'I'm responsible.' Article originally published at The Atlantic

Bloomberg

11-06-2025

• Bloomberg

Inside the ‘Dragon Age' Debacle That Gutted EA's BioWare Studio

In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio's previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA's many casualties.