The Backrooms–the iconic, yellow, liminal corridors that feel designed by unnerving dream logic–have gone from the subject of a 2019 forum post to a major movie adaptation in just seven years. It’s a trajectory that outpaces Slenderman, its predecessor in the burgeoning creepypasta-to-Hollywood pathway. Backrooms YouTube videos have dominated the time between that first post and today, to the extent that the A24-produced horror movie coming out on May 29 is directed by the 20-year-old Kane Parsons, whose YouTube channel blew up in popularity thanks to his unsettling Backrooms videos.
But it’s not just on YouTube where you’ll find dozens of hours of Backrooms and liminal-space stories. Video games have been obsessed with the Backrooms for years now, to the extent that searching for the term on Steam turns up nearly 600 results–and that doesn’t even count the many games that don’t use that word in their titles, but are focused on the same subject matter.
Naturally, the quality of these games varies greatly. Beyond the vaguely unsettling walls themselves, what makes a Backrooms game can differ greatly, from co-op campaigns full of puzzles, to walking sims devoid of monsters, to full-on survival-horror experiences.
Among all of the many Backrooms games playable today, a few stand out as highlights. If you want to get acquainted with what the Backrooms are, consider this your starter guide to the world of the best Backrooms video games.
Puppet Combo’s The Backrooms
One of the newest of the hundreds of Backrooms games is also one of the best, which is maybe no surprise if you’re familiar with the team that made it. Puppet Combo is a small indie team specializing in horror games with PlayStation 1 aesthetics. I was really excited to see them take on a liminal-space game because they so often do slasher, grindhouse-feeling stuff, making this an intriguing departure.
The Backrooms still has the studio’s look and feel, but it also benefits from the team’s style of storytelling, which I didn’t think I cared to have in a game like this until I saw Puppet Combo do it very well.
The Complex: Expedition
One of the first Backrooms games I played was one I stumbled upon that doesn’t even mention the word in its title. The Complex: Expedition is a first-person Backrooms walking-sim horror game from pgWave. Strangely, it’s also sort of like a spiritual successor to the team’s only other game, The Complex: Found Footage, in that they’re both Backrooms games but this latter effort is a bit more complex and polished. Expedition tells a different story and improves on its predecessor’s visual fidelity, though it still looks quite lo-fi, which players tend to prefer in these games.
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