Escape the Backrooms

I will be honest with you: I came into this one expecting cheap atmosphere held together by creepypasta nostalgia, and I walked away with a grudging respect for what Fancy Games actually built across three years of Early Access. The 1.0 release that dropped in October 2025 is a genuinely substantial co-op horror game, not a tech demo dressed up in yellow wallpaper. That said, it earns its praise unevenly, and you deserve to know where the seams show. The format is simple. Up to four players drop into a sequence of distinct liminal levels, hunt for exits, solve light puzzles, and avoid a rotating cast of entities that each play by different rules. The Bacteria lurks in the opening yellow corridors and chases you on sight. Smilers glow in the dark and only attack when you look directly at them, so your first instinct is the wrong one. Skin-Stealers disguise themselves as other players, which in a four-player session creates a paranoia that no amount of proximity voice chat can fully defuse. Deathmoths ignore you until you shine a flashlight on them. Learning each entity's ruleset is genuinely the most satisfying thing in the game, and the proximity voice chat mechanic doubles down on that: entities can hear you talk, so coordinating a plan near danger means whispering actual instructions to your friends. That moment when someone shouts and draws a Hound is peak horror-comedy for the right group. The level variety is the other strong suit. You move through the iconic yellow Level 0, then Level Fun with its Partygoer entities and party-trap layouts, the Poolrooms, the Grassrooms, suburban streets, a wheat field, an arcade, and eventually Level 3999 for the true ending, which uses a randomised task list to keep things unpredictable on repeat runs. The 1.0 update added a non-linear level layout alongside new entries like the Bunker and Overgrowth, so there is genuine breadth here. The group requirement that every player must reach the exit alive creates co-op tension that most casual horror games skip entirely: one panicking friend who sprints ahead can trap the whole lobby. But the honest criticism from reviewers and the broader community lands squarely on the exploration phase. Moving between puzzle beats often means wandering identical-looking corridors hoping you find the right turn. There is no breadcrumb system, limited environmental signposting, and aimless stretches can drain the atmosphere the entity encounters build up. The puzzle quality also swings widely: a colour-code keypad in Level 2 that demands either pure guesswork or careful clue-hunting is satisfying when it clicks, but some later puzzles lean toward trial-and-error in a way that kills momentum. Critics have noted animations and UI that still carry an Early Access feel despite the 1.0 label, and entity AI can sometimes feel inconsistent at harder difficulties. Nightmare mode layers permadeath and heightened sanity drain onto the base experience, which is genuinely punishing but does sharpen the co-op coordination in a way that a Saturday night group will either love or loudly quit over. As a co-op pick for friends who care about shared screaming more than mechanical depth, this does the job well. Solo play is technically supported but hollow; the entire design assumes you have a group to coordinate with. There is no split-screen, so four players means four copies and four machines. For a session where everyone already knows the Backrooms lore, the level-to-level variety reads like a greatest-hits tour of internet horror mythology, which is exactly what you want. For a group coming in cold, the vibe is strong enough to carry the first few hours before the repetition of the exploration phase starts to bite.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Escape the Backrooms.