If you don’t know what The Backrooms are, you probably don’t have kids of a certain age. Born as a more specific branch of the liminal-space genre, The Backrooms is the all-encompassing name for a horror lore bible of sorts that’s been handcrafted by communities online over several years. Each inhuman monster and each unnerving location becomes a chapter of a horror universe that the internet built together. It’s grown so big that it’s spawned dozens of related games, an upcoming horror movie from A24, and what feels like an endless stream of YouTube content to watch. But through it all, Escape The Backrooms has remained one of the most popular portrayals of the fictional world, and now plays like a labyrinthine museum to one of the internet’s favorite scary stories.
Escape The Backrooms is a first-person defenseless horror game for up to four players in co-op. It’s been popular as a Steam Early Access title for a few years, but its 1.0 version has finally arrived. In Escape The Backrooms, you’ll explore a great number of the internet-created pocket universes of the wider Backrooms lore. Each “room” of The Backrooms presents a different take on liminal horror. This includes the iconic yellow labyrinth that kicked off the entire subgenre, as well as other popular landing spots, like Level Fun, the Poolrooms, and the Grassrooms. One of the game’s best feats is simply the number of locations it explores. By nature of being owned by, well, everyone in a sense, lore is played fast and loose. Escape The Backrooms does well in involving many of these different rooms, giving players a history lesson on its unsettling universe.
The gameplay loop is very simple. You’ll explore each eerie, liminal space while seeking different means of exiting. Mechanically, you’ll hardly do anything at all beyond waving a flashlight around and consuming found cartons of almond water to restore your ever-draining sanity meter. Sometimes, you’ll need to solve environmental puzzles, like learning which playground slide you can safely head down (since most eject you in several bloody chunks). Occasionally, key items, including literal keys, must be found to progress, forcing you to repeatedly head off in search of semi-randomly placed quest items. In an early level, you’ll need to rebuild a ladder to reach a key to the exit door, for example, while in another, you’ll search for elevators in a darkened parking garage that would be totally empty if not for the roaming “skin-stealer” monster hidden in the shadows.
This skin-stealer is especially creepy, as it dresses in the same yellow HAZMAT suit that you and your co-op pals wear, and it’ll call out on the radio pretending to be another player. But as soon as it sees you, it morphs into its true form, a towering grey-skinned aberration with zipper-like teeth running down its abdomen, and it pursues you until it either one-shot-kills you or you make it to one of the several safe rooms it can’t enter. And this is just one of many different monsters you’ll encounter, each of which are confined to the particular “rooms” to which they belong.
