Exit 8’s director on the rules he broke to make a great video game movie

Still, comparing the different evolutions of the Exit 8 story is fascinating in its own right. Exit 8 started out as a walking-sim indie game that drops the player in that same physics-defying maze of white corridors, searching for anomalies that will signal the way out. But game designer Kotake Create offers no backstory about who the point-of-view character is, or how or why they ended up in the maze. For the movie, writer-director Genki Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase had to build a rationale around the experience, and a character whose situation justifies the world literally warping around him.