Highlights
- The upcoming Backrooms game doesn’t capture the horror of the concept as effectively as other existing iterations.
- The game has good graphics and a cool concept, but falls short with unimaginative puzzle design and average monster sound design.
- There are better free versions of Backrooms games already available, such as The Backroom – Lost and Found and The Complex: Found Footage.
As of this moment, there are nearly 300 Backrooms games listed on Steam—BackRooms, BACKROOMS, Escape the Backrooms, The Backrooms, In The Backrooms, all the variations you can think of. So what’s another one to add to the mix? In fairness, the upcoming Backrooms looks like it has much higher production values than the vast majority of the amateur efforts out there, but having now played the demo, I can’t help but feel that it misses the mark on what’s made the whole concept such an effective horror vehicle.
For the uninitiated, The Backrooms originates from a creepypasta story posted on 4chan in 2019. Essentially, it’s a surreal empty office space, with unpleasant yellowy-green wallpaper and halogen lighting. It pretty much kicked off the trend for liminal spaces online, where TikTokers and Instagrams by the thousands would post photos of eerie, nocturnal, empty spaces that evoke a sense of existing between dimensions, as if turning a corner or opening a door might cause you to stumble into some dark Netherrealm, or cause entities to pour out of it.
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Back To The Backrooms
This latest take on the concept opts for a pretty simplistic interpretation that doesn’t makes the most of the cool idea at its core. In Backrooms, you, alongside a few friends, explore a series of these liminal spaces—which range from the iconic yellow offices, to abandoned swimming pools, to spooky woods—and must solve what appear to be quite simple puzzles to progress.
It deploys a cool aesthetic, with a 90-style home camera UI and graininess effectively evoking that Found Footage feel. The exaggerated camera wobble contributes to this immersive, almost woozy atmosphere, though in truth I think they overdid it a little bit, to the extent that your avatar’s head behaves like their neck is made out of a slinky. It’s a tad intense.
All Backrooms really has going for it is the graphics and the concept, and on both fronts there are already better (and free!) Backrooms iterations out there.
After a decent initial visual impression, Backrooms falls back on unimaginative puzzle design and an obnoxiously screechy monsters for its cheap thrills. One of the puzzles involves pulling several levers randomly dotted around the largely homogeneous Backrooms space. There’s no map, no sense of direction, no nothing, and before long it feels about as cohesive a space to navigate as the ancient 3D Monster Maze, leaving you to randomly wandering in search of the Macguffins needed to proceed (see my gameplay footage below).
The creature itself looks spooky enough, and is faithful to the one depicted in the actually very good short YouTube film made by Kane Pixels, which is probably about as close to canonical as any Backrooms-related content gets. Where the creature in the demo really falls short is in the sound design. The creature in the YouTube short had this excellent abstract cry, which sounded like some kind of anguished singing distorted through poor radio signal. That staticky feel really fitted with the sense that you were exploring some interdimensional space, whereas in this demo the creature emits a fairly classic ‘monster scream,’ which to me isn’t nearly as unsettling or impactful. Oh, and also the entity seems to be quite easy to outrun, which does the suspense no favours.
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From what I’ve played, all Backrooms really has going for it is the graphics and the concept, and on both fronts there are already better (and free!) iterations out there. The Backrooms concept is one that plenty of devs have cashed in on or simply used it as a platform to experiment with game ideas, but there are a few takes on it out there that are worth playing.
Backrooms Can Do Better
The Complex: Found Footage is a free short game, and probably the best take on the Backrooms concept to date.
The Backroom – Lost and Found (free on Steam) is a case in point. The free game plays with Silent Hill-style Light World and Dark World ideas, has two chapters, multiple endings, and some nice-and-creepy imagery. My personal favourite however, is probably The Complex: Found Footage (also free on Steam]), which may well be the best videogame depiction of that grainy 90s Found Footage aesthetic (right down to the 4:3 aspect ratio), and has some incredible lighting and environmental design; at moments, it’s like something straight out of a David Lynch movie.
It’s tense, eerie, and the best videogame representation of liminal space that I’ve played. It’s only about half an hour long, and I won’t give away its core conceit, other than to say it will surprise you. Don’t research it. Don’t spoil it for yourself. Just dive right in and see for yourself.
All that said, I still think that Backrooms—for all its iterations—is still waiting for that star game that really makes the most of the concept, layering the liminal spaces over with a surreal story for players to piece together (I envision something as conceptually high-minded as Stanley Parable, with similar exploration but of course a much heavier helping of Found Footage Horror). Based on the demo I’ve just played however, Backrooms won’t be it.
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