I’m not why I had no idea what Backrooms was all about for the past few years. It must have been a blind spot. I came across Backrooms via a Hacker News post. Some guy had apparently found where the original pictures that started the Backrooms urban legend came from. That’s all good and well, but what is Backrooms?

Origin Story

Apparently some folks found some pictures of odd looking yellowish hallways, and made up stories on that basis. Like this were pictures of some kind of underground maze, infested with strange creatures and monsters. Then at some point came the idea that some people wearing hazmat suits would be researching stuff in those areas, and you end up with the overall visuals that make up that kind of world nowadays:

It’s been years that different people are creating short stories and youtube videos on that theme, and some of them are actually pretty good. Scary, but good, and somewhat fun at the same time. Here is one of the most famous short movies about Backrooms:

So after that initial HN post a few months back, I fell into a rabbit hole and ended up spending hours checking different sites and videos about Backrooms. Turns out that there’s also people developing games on that concept, and one of them on Steam is Backrooms: Escape Together. I’m only going to give a short impression of the game, and a partial one at that - since the game initially did not work on the Steam Deck (it ran, but the keyboard input which is necessary to create a profile had an issue), but that was fixed recently and the game now works just fine on it.

There’s a multiplayer mode, and this is where the whole fun is, since you try to survive together with other researchers who are lost in this yellowish hell. But I only tried the solo missions, so I won’t able to comment on that just yet.

Visually, it’s very well done. It uses the Unreal Engine 5. You feel like you are there, in those youtube videos you have watched. The white audio noise in the background, the depressing corridors, the neverending turns… and of course, the monsters that show up all of a sudden, forcing you to run screaming, trying to find an exit to escape a certain death. The monsters are very scary. Mostly because they look like nothing you’ve seen before.

I must admit, this is scarier than most of the usual horror games I have played. It’s not just the monsters. The world itself is weird to the max and unpredictable. There’s no house, no street, no common ground. You are stuck in the Backrooms with deadly creatures and who knows if there is any way to escape!?

Or Just Hide?

That’s certainly an option. Instead of looking for an actual exit, sometimes a safer bet is to find a place to hide, hoping that the monster that’s chasing you will continue on its way and not find out where you are. The levels also change progressively (I think there are seven of them right now, and the dev is adding more content over time) and move away from the yellow themed mazes. In any case, there is no combat. This may look like a FPS at first, but you don’t have any weapon and this is just about exploration and survival, alone or with others.

The exploration will lead you to find graffiti on walls, messages, strange diagrams that seem to point at something… or are they just random? As you continue the exploration, you end up in darker areas requiring your torch light. And you know that when a game forces you to use a torchlight, it’s a bad sign. You can expect some serious jump scares, and this game does not disappoint.

What’s Next?

I have a very positive impression of this title so far. It’s shaping well. It’s very successful at making you feel stuck and oppressed, and now I really need to spend time on the multiplayer mode to see how this changes things. The game is still in Early Access, and there’s probably ways to go before a final release (more levels I guess). It works fine with Proton on Linux, and as I mentioned earlier it works great on the Steam Deck as well. You can play it with the default settings and about 9W dedicated to the GPU for a good framerate.

I will probably talk about the game again once it its 1.0. In the meantime, even if you are not interested in the game, I recommend you spend some time checking out what Backrooms is about, on Youtube or elsewhere. It’s a good ride.

Note: We were provided a key from the publisher to try out the game.