Backrooms Media

My first impression of Backrooms Media was that it nails the one thing this genre lives or dies on: atmosphere. The whole game is rendered through a VHS camera POV, complete with screen blur, chromatic aberration creeping in from the edges, muted colours, and occasional static bursts that genuinely unsettle the eye. There is no background music. Silence is the score, broken only by your teammates and whatever is moving toward you. For a solo-developer indie title, that aesthetic commitment is real and it works. The core loop asks you and up to three other players to move through distinct liminal levels, collect clues, solve environmental puzzles, and get out before the anomalies find you. Puzzles can be bypassed entirely via an auto-solver option if you just want the horror experience without the head-scratching, which is a reasonable concession. Tools like a radar that pings all lifeforms nearby, a decoy you can toss to pull entities off your trail, a sensor that triggers on proximity, and a stopping shocker for last-resort stunning add more tactical texture than the early-access build had. The Hunt mode, which added a dedicated level called Level Fun post-launch, reframes things as a team tracking an entity rather than running from it, and procedurally generated layouts in that mode give it more replayability than the handcrafted escape levels. Here is where the honesty has to land. Community reception during early access was rough, and not all of those complaints were fixed by the 1.0 release. Enemy AI has been inconsistent across updates, with some players reporting that entities lock onto a single target and refuse to switch, which warps co-op into an involuntary sacrifice rotation rather than coordinated survival. The invite system had documented problems requiring players to manually switch Steam server regions just to join a friend, which is not a minor friction point for a co-op-first game. Level variety is thinner than comparable entries in the genre. Walking pace can feel punishingly slow for levels that do not reward cautious movement with enough tension to justify it. The absence of an inventory system in the base experience also limits the strategic options that the tool roster hints at. That said, the workshop support is live and matters. Modders have a legitimate pipeline to extend the level count and potentially fix the content-depth problem, so the long-term outlook depends heavily on whether a community builds around it. The developer has shipped meaningful updates throughout the early access window and has shown willingness to take feedback seriously. If you are a Backrooms lore enthusiast who has already exhausted the polished alternatives, this one has an atmosphere worth experiencing once, ideally with three people who can tolerate some jank. If you are new to the genre, start with a more complete entry and circle back if the workshop scene grows. The VHS filter and the silence are genuinely good. Everything scaffolding that experience is still a work in progress.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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