There is something uniquely unsettling about being alone at work after dark. During the day, even the most ordinary workplace feels alive with people, noise and distractions, but once everyone has gone home, the same four walls can suddenly feel very different. Before Exit: Gas Station understands that feeling perfectly, taking one of the most mundane jobs imaginable and turning it into a creeping little nightmare where checking the shelves and cleaning up spills can become matters of life and death. It is a game that thrives on making you question what you have just seen and, more importantly, whether you can trust your own eyes.
Following in the footsteps of Before Exit: Supermarket, this latest instalment takes the anomaly detection formula and moves it to an even more isolated setting. You are working at a lonely petrol station in the middle of nowhere, and your boss has one very simple instruction when night falls: close everything down, turn off the lights and go home. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Of course, this being a horror game, it very much isn’t.
Welcome to the Night Shift
The genius of Before Exit: Gas Station is that it begins by making you comfortable. Your early shifts are relatively ordinary, with familiar tasks to complete around the station. You stock shelves, clean oil stains, check the fuel dispensers, close windows and deal with customers who apparently cannot understand that closing time means exactly that.
These tasks are deliberately mundane, and that is precisely why they work. You begin to learn the station’s layout almost without realising it, memorising where things belong and developing a routine. Once that routine has settled, the game quietly pulls the rug from under you.
An item might be somewhere it should not be. A door may be open when you are certain you closed it. Something in the environment might have changed ever so slightly. None of these things are particularly frightening in isolation, but when you are standing in an empty petrol station late at night, that misplaced object suddenly becomes incredibly important. The game gets considerable mileage from this simple idea. It makes you pay attention.
Spot the Difference
At the heart of Before Exit: Gas Station is its anomaly detection system, and this is where the game becomes genuinely addictive. The idea is straightforward: observe your surroundings, identify anything that looks wrong, and respond accordingly. The difficulty lies in the fact that anomalies are not always obvious.
Some changes are easy to spot, while others require you to remember how the station looked before. That means you are not simply searching for something frightening. You are building a mental photograph of the environment and comparing what you see now with what you remember from earlier shifts.
This creates an unusual kind of tension because the game encourages careful observation rather than frantic reactions. You can stand in a room for several seconds, wondering whether that object has always been there. You might walk away, convince yourself that everything is fine, then turn around because something about the scene just does not feel right.
That uncertainty is where the horror lives. Before Exit: Gas Station rarely needs to throw something directly into your face to make you uncomfortable. Sometimes it is far more effective simply to make you wonder whether you saw something move.
Your Boss Is Watching
If the supernatural elements were not enough, there is also the small matter of your boss. He is strict, observant, and apparently has very little tolerance for mistakes, adding another layer of pressure to an already uncomfortable job.
Early tasks encourage you to follow instructions carefully, and the consequences of missing something can be surprisingly harsh. Leave a door open, overlook an important detail, or fail to complete the correct closing procedure, and you can find yourself facing the consequences.
The boss becomes part of the game’s psychological pressure because you are constantly aware that you are being judged. It is an amusingly mundane concern set alongside increasingly bizarre supernatural events. You are trying to determine whether the thing standing near the pumps is an anomaly while simultaneously worrying that you might get fired for forgetting to lock something. That contrast gives the game much of its personality. It can be creepy one moment and almost darkly funny the next.
A Routine That Keeps Changing
The roguelike elements work particularly well because repeated playthroughs are not simply about doing exactly the same thing again. Each shift can introduce different scenarios, new anomalies and fresh pieces of the story. You gradually learn what to expect, while still having enough uncertainty to keep you looking over your shoulder.
More than forty story-rich scenarios provide plenty of reasons to return, while multiple endings encourage experimentation. The six bonus episodes also add another layer for players who want to dig deeper into what is actually happening.
The requirement to play through the campaign several times may sound repetitive on paper, but here it becomes part of the mystery. You are not replaying purely because the game wants you to grind. You are replaying because there are still questions that need answering.
That distinction matters. When a horror game leaves you wanting to understand what happened rather than simply telling you everything, repetition can become surprisingly compelling.
There Is More to This Place
The narrative is deliberately mysterious, and I appreciated that. Before Exit: Gas Station does not rush to explain every strange event or hand you a neatly packaged answer. Instead, it scatters pieces of information across the different scenarios and lets you gradually realise that the petrol station is far more significant than it first appears.
There are unexpected twists along the way, and the multiple endings make your decisions and discoveries feel worthwhile. The true ending becomes something to chase rather than something that simply arrives at the conclusion of your first playthrough.
It is also nice that the story remains grounded in an everyday setting. This is not some grand haunted mansion or abandoned hospital filled with the usual horror game clichés. It is a petrol station, complete with snacks, fuel pumps, dirty floors and customers who desperately need to fill up five minutes after you were supposed to close. That familiarity makes the strange moments feel even stranger.
Americana After Dark
Visually, Before Exit: Gas Station does not need cutting-edge graphics to create an effective atmosphere. The lonely petrol station, flickering fluorescent lighting, and the dark highway surrounding the building do most of the heavy lifting.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about looking through the windows into an almost completely black landscape. During the day, the surrounding area feels empty but harmless. At night, that same emptiness becomes threatening because you cannot help wondering what might be out there.
The relatively simple character models and animations occasionally remind you that this is an indie production, but the atmosphere is far more important than graphical sophistication here. The environment is readable enough for spotting anomalies, and the restrained visual design allows small changes to stand out. That is exactly what the game needs.
Silence Is Your Worst Enemy
The audio design deserves particular credit because Before Exit: Gas Station understands that silence can be far more frightening than a loud soundtrack.
The hum of refrigeration units, the sound of your footsteps and the occasional background noise from the station create a strangely believable atmosphere. There are long stretches when very little happens, and those quiet moments encourage you to listen for anything that might not belong.
Then the radio might suddenly come alive with some harmless store music, briefly reminding you that this is supposed to be a normal workplace. It is an effective contrast, as the ordinary sounds make the unsettling ones more noticeable.
There is confidence in the way the game uses restraint. It does not need to bombard you with jump scares every few minutes. Sometimes the most effective horror is simply standing alone beneath a buzzing fluorescent light and realising that something has changed.
How Long Can You Stay?
The biggest question about Before Exit: Gas Station is whether the repetition will appeal to everyone. It is fundamentally a game about observing, remembering and replaying, so anyone seeking constant action may find the pace too deliberate.
For the right audience, however, that repetition is the appeal. Each new run offers another chance to spot what you missed, uncover another piece of the story, or move closer to the true ending.
It is a game that rewards patience. You have to be willing to look carefully, accept that you will make mistakes, and understand that failure is part of the process. When you finally recognise an anomaly that previously slipped by, there is a genuine little burst of satisfaction.
The Verdict
Before Exit: Gas Station is a wonderfully strange little horror game. It takes the ordinary routine of closing a workplace and slowly transforms it into something unsettling, forcing you to question every object, every sound, and eventually your own memory.
The anomaly-detection mechanics are simple but effective, particularly when combined with the roguelike structure and branching story. The large number of scenarios and multiple endings give you a reason to keep returning, while the atmosphere does an excellent job of turning an otherwise forgettable petrol station into somewhere you will probably be very happy to leave behind.
What makes it work is its restraint. The game understands that horror does not always need blood, monsters, or enormous jump scares. Sometimes all it takes is a door you are sure you closed, an object that was not there five minutes ago, and the uncomfortable suspicion that somebody might be watching you.
There is also something wonderfully British about being terrified by supernatural anomalies while still worrying about whether you have completed your closing checklist correctly. Before Exit: Gas Station finds a surprisingly effective balance between the mundane and the bizarre, and it kept me curious enough to return when I probably should have known better.
It may not have the production values of the biggest horror releases, but it has something arguably more important: an idea that works. Take IT Studio! has turned an ordinary petrol station into a place where memory becomes a weapon, routine becomes a trap, and going home is no longer quite as simple as it sounds. Just remember to check the pumps before you leave. And maybe check them again.
