Game Review: Floor 9 (Xbox Series X)

Neither the best nor the worst ‘anomaly spotting’ game I’ve played, Floor 9 sits squarely in the middle being a mostly unremarkable experience. Bar one or two decent scares and a touch of atmosphere. Which should see my opinion on it leaning more towards it being a good game, except there’s one maddening aspect that drags it down and some niggling issues here and here.

Coming from Room Games, Floor 9 has you, the player, trapped within in a mysterious hotel known as Hotel Liminal. The floor you are on constantly loops, unless you can spot what is or isn’t different each time. It’s a very familiar style of gameplay for those who know these types of games and Floor 9 doesn’t make any changes to the formula.

The entire game takes place on one floor, where you step out of the lift on floor 9. The first thing that will stand out is just how quiet it is. This is what gives the game its atmosphere. Where you almost feel like you have to hold your breath, in case someone or something hears you. My initial exploration was thrilling. Studying each room door, looking at the detail in the paintings, taking note of some of the decorative items, and wondering just how the nearby maid was going to come into things.

To continue the game, you must go back to the elevator and choose one of two buttons. One that represents having seen an anomaly, and one that represents everything appearing normal. Get it right and the lift doors will open on floor 8, and so on, until you reach the bottom. Get it wrong, and you’re sent right back to floor 9. Inevitably, you will get it wrong a lot to begin with. After all, anomaly games are little more than a memory game.

Floor 9 has 30 anomalies, according to an in-game counter and they range in difficulty. Some are glaringly obvious, such as blood seeping out from under a door, a coffin appearing in the hallway, a ghostly figure pressed up against a window, or the maid taking on a more ‘threatening’ position. Some are quite tough to notice. Such as an end table being a bit further away from the wall, a firehose label having a Satanic symbol on it, or a strange doll appearing above the elevator. These are the ones you will get wrong time and time again, especially as seeing some of the tricker ones is made harder by the game’s visuals.

Floor 9 has dark spots, where some anomalies occur, and it can be challenging to see them in the gloom. The solution, naturally, is to turn the brightness up, except this doesn’t work. I turned the in-game brightness up to its fullest in the options, hit confirm, and nothing changed. Useful.

It’s not the only technical issue either as sometimes the pause button just stopped working. Weird, right?

All quite minor in the grand scheme of things, and visually, the game holds up well and fits the tone, overall. However, like a lot of anomaly games, Floor 9 is limited and once you get good at it, you can complete it in less than five minutes. There’s even an achievement for doing that. What extends gameplay is trying to find all the anomalies and that brings me to the game’s biggest flaw.

Some anomalies are so rare, that you can play for hours and not see them. I have sunk hours into this game, and I am stuck on 29/30. I don’t even know what I’m missing as online lists add more that I’ve not seen. I can’t help but think it’s glitched, and that’s annoying. Yet, nonetheless, making some anomalies super rare is dumb and it quickly turns the game into something of a slog if you’re aiming to 100% it.

If you don’t care about that sort of thing, then you’ll have a much better time. A short time, probably about an hour at most, but a better time overall. Even with the issues mentioned, I still don’t think it’s a bad game. I just don’t think it’s that good either, especially when there are so many better anomaly games out there.