I do not know whose job it is I’m simming this evening, but I know they deserve better, my god.

I like to think that all these be-suited people agree.

8AM is an anomaly-spotting horror game. You play as an unnamed watcher, scrolling through CCTV footage of a family’s home and spotting signs of a haunting. As a watcher, you must scan for anything out of the ordinary and, upon spotting it, note down that it exists before moving on to the next round of cameras.

In theory, anomaly-spotting games can be good, tense fun. I loved Cabin Factory, and I’m On Observation Duty is a perennial favourite. There is a decided satisfaction to combining spot-the-differences gameplay with horror elements. When done well, the genre makes peering into the darkness and struggling to remember whether that rug was striped or polka dotted feel like an act as vital to survival as fighting a dragon. That it’s all done in silence with nothing but your own thoughts and heartbeat running through your head makes it all the better.

Part of how these games achieve this is through a sense of stakes. It’s not enough to need to spot an anomaly. Not spotting the anomaly means a monster lunges out of the darkness, or - more likely - you lose your job because you were bad at it, which is the greatest horror of all. There is a sense of urgency is spotting the differences, not only because the differences are important, but because the knowledge that they exist and you’re not spotting them gnaws at you, heightening the tension and making you an absolute wreck. The enemy in these games is yourself - the anomalies are just here to highlight how right your mother was when she called you a miserable parcel of utter disappointment that couldn’t even get an award for wasting your life properly.

The only anomaly here is that someone rebuilt the garden I always build when I have too much money in the Sims.

8AM does none of these things. While I’m not going to pretend I found every anomaly in the game, I did beat the game twice in 15 minutes, implying I’m not bad at it. Part of why this game is dull is its anomaly design. Seeing a shadow in a bathtub or someone getting up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night is neither anomalous nor particularly interesting. At no point did I ever feel like I was missing something, and if I was, it clearly wasn’t something that should bother me. That creeping sense of horror, of the Sword of Damocles bearing down on me for not being able to correctly spot the differences never appeared. Instead, I was left watching people sleep in an overly fancy house, feeling nothing in particular as I did so.

The larger problem with 8AM, however, is more fundamental to how it chooses to incorporate the player report option. In most games of the genre, whether an anomaly exists is not necessarily a binary option. It isn’t enough to know that an anomaly exists somewhere; instead, it’s important to know where that anomaly exists and what specifically is triggering that creeping feeling up the back of your neck. In I’m On Observation Duty, for example, players scan through rooms on a CCTV camera, signalling an anomaly when they are observing a room with an anomaly. There is a requirement that the player engage with the fundamental mechanic of the game and be able to say with confidence that something is there.

Similarly, part of what builds the tension in the genre is the knowledge that mistakes have consequences. Misidentifying something as an anomaly - or worse, missing the anomaly entirely - triggers penalties or strikes that make the player more paranoid about what they do or do not notice in the future.

Neither of these are present in 8AM. While the player does cycle through CCTV cameras in 8AM, they don’t technically have to to win the game. The option to identify an anomaly is done by clicking a yes/no button beside the CCTV footage. A player could mash “yes” repeatedly without opening the CCTV footage at any point, winning through sheer chance alone.

Not that I tested this. I would never. I’m deeply ethical in everything I do.

Equally, while 8AM does reset progress if a player makes a mistake, it’s difficult to notice that it happened at all, removing any real sense of tension from the game. If I spot an anomaly, great, and if I don’t, all the merrier in the weirdly huge house. It’s not me that suffers for it.

Why is everyone wearing long sleeve shirts to bed and leaving lit candles lying around? Have we considered that these sorts of weird activities are what attract the haints in the first place?

This lack of tension and lack of any real sense of stakes or potential horrors changes the game from something that had the potential for good, light-hearted fear into something that’s just a dull slog. If anything, playing this made me more ready to toddle off to bed than I already had been. Watching people sleep made my own eyes heavy. Staring at the empty spot in a bed that was meant to be spooky left me thinking about the empty spot in my bed, calling to me, and waiting to swaddle me in cosiness and warmth.

In that regard, at least, kudos to 8AM. I’m pretty sure it will bring me a lovely night’s sleep, as it will you. Good night, and sleep well. May the haints hold you tight.

Developer: David Gallardo
Genre: Horror, Job sim
Year: 2024
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 5 minutes/run
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/UczwEUCeNGA