There’s a unique, creeping dread that comes with being the last person to lock up for the night. The familiar hums of daytime commerce fade into an unsettling silence, every shadow seems to lengthen, and the mundane transforms into the menacing. Take IT Studio! has bottled that exact feeling of late-night paranoia and distilled it into a potent, nerve-shredding experience with Before Exit: Gas Station. Following up on their cult hit Before Exit: Supermarket, this sequel doesn’t just ask you to do your job; it asks you to survive it, one terrifyingly meticulous task at a time.
This isn’t your typical horror game filled with monsters and gore. This is a game about checklists, cleaning, and the chilling realization that something in your reality is fundamentally broken. It’s a pressure cooker of responsibility where the greatest threat isn’t a creature in the dark, but the wrath of your omnipresent, unnervingly observant boss. As we found out, this is “an intense, stress-inducing simulation game where every task matters. Can you clean up, serve customers, and close shop in time? Be prepared for a challenge!” After countless shifts spent questioning our own sanity, we can confirm: Before Exit: Gas Station is one of the most uniquely addictive and cleverly terrifying indie games of the year.
One Last Shift at the Edge of Reality
You’re back on the clock as the beloved (and beleaguered) employee, tasked with the nightly closing duties at a remote gas station. The premise is simple: clean up the mess from the day shift, serve the last few customers, check the fuel dispensers, lock the doors, and turn out the lights. Complete your checklist, and you get to go home. Make a mistake, overlook a detail, and your hyper-critical boss will ensure you know about it. It’s a scenario grounded in the relatable drudgery of a service job, which makes the game’s central twist all the more effective.
This is an anomaly-detection game. As you perform your duties, glitches in reality begin to manifest. A trash can might be floating an inch off the ground. A poster might display text in a language you don’t recognize. The reflection in a puddle might not be your own. Your job isn’t just to clean floors, but to spot these terrifying inconsistencies and report them. The story, which cleverly connects to the developer’s previous title, is a slow-burning mystery that unfolds across multiple playthroughs. With four different endings and six bonus episodes, the simple act of “going home” becomes a cryptic, compelling goal that will have you clocking in for just one more shift, again and again.
The Art of Paranoid Cleaning
The gameplay loop of Before Exit: Gas Station is its greatest strength. Each day is a new, randomly generated scenario drawn from a pool of over 40 distinct possibilities. This roguelike structure ensures that no two shifts are ever quite the same, keeping you constantly on edge. One night might be a straightforward cleaning detail, while the next could involve a bizarre parkour challenge to fix a flickering light or a logic puzzle to appease a strange customer. This variety is key to the game’s incredible replayability, transforming a simple premise into an obsession.
While completing your tasks, you are in a constant state of high alert. Is that oil stain a task to be cleaned, or is its unnatural shape an anomaly? Did that customer just pay with regular currency, or was there something wrong with the bills? The genius of the design is how it forces you to scrutinize the mundane until it becomes alien. The constant, jump-scare-like presence of your boss, who can appear at any moment to critique your work, adds a layer of hilarious panic to the proceedings. He is both a source of terror and dark comedy, and his approval becomes the ultimate, often unattainable prize.
The Unsettling Ambience of Fluorescent Dread
Visually, the game nails the sterile, slightly grimy aesthetic of a roadside gas station. The lighting is harsh under the fluorescent bulbs of the main store, casting long, eerie shadows once you step outside to check the pumps. But the game’s true atmospheric power is unleashed in its quietest moments. One of the most effective mechanics is shutting off the main power. The cheerful, looping in-store music cuts out abruptly, plunging the world into a thick, unnerving silence broken only by the hum of a distant cooler or your own footsteps. In these moments, the station feels vast, empty, and deeply wrong. You wish for a jump scare to break the tension, but the game is smarter than that; it lets the quiet dread do the work, making you the source of your own fear.
The Sound of Your Sanity Fraying
The sound design is minimalist but incredibly impactful. The transition from the mundane sounds of a working day to the dead quiet of closing time is a masterstroke. Every subtle noise becomes a potential threat. The gentle chime of the front door, the creak of a shelf, the distant rumble of a passing car—are these normal occurrences, or are they anomalies designed to trick you? The sound—or lack thereof—plays with your expectations, turning a familiar environment into a hostile soundscape. This masterful use of audio ensures that even when nothing is happening, the tension remains suffocatingly high.
A Surprisingly Perfect Social Competition
While Before Exit: Gas Station is a single-player experience, it has proven to be an absolute blast with friends. We quickly fell into a simple competition: who could survive the work week and reach one of the endings without getting fired first? This transformed the game from a solitary exercise in paranoia into a hilarious, high-stakes contest. Sharing stories of bizarre anomalies, frustrating boss encounters, and near-misses became a daily ritual. It’s a testament to the game’s strong core design that it can foster this kind of emergent, competitive fun without any built-in multiplayer features. If you and your friends are looking for a new obsession, this is it.
Before Exit: Gas Station is a brilliant evolution of the anomaly-detection genre. It expertly blends the mundane stress of a service job with the existential dread of a crumbling reality. Its roguelike structure and vast pool of scenarios make it intensely addictive, while its thick atmosphere and clever sound design create a truly unsettling experience. While the overarching story can be a bit cryptic on the first run, the gameplay loop is so compelling that you’ll be eager to dive back in to uncover its secrets. It’s a game that makes you laugh in terror, sweat over a cleaning checklist, and see the sinister possibilities lurking within the most ordinary of places. Take IT Studio! has crafted a must-play indie gem that is stressful, spooky, and utterly unforgettable.
Pros:
- Incredibly addictive and replayable roguelike gameplay loop.
- A masterclass in building tension and atmosphere.
- Unique and well-executed anomaly-detection mechanics.
- A massive amount of content with 40+ scenarios and multiple endings.
- The “boss” is a hilarious and terrifying antagonist.
- Unexpectedly brilliant for competitive social play.
Cons:
- The story can be confusing without multiple playthroughs.
- Random scenario generation can occasionally lead to repetition.
- A few specific challenges can feel more frustrating than fun.
Before Exit: Gas Station: Before Exit: Gas Station turns the nightly closing shift into a nail-biting descent into paranoia. With a gameplay loop that’s as addictive as it is terrifying and an atmosphere thick with dread, it stands out as one of the most creative and compelling indie horror games in recent memory. You’ll never look at a gas station the same way again. – Obsidian
