The Backrooms: Survival

I came into The Backrooms: Survival looking for a horror co-op loop I could actually run with a crew, something with teeth beyond the usual "walk slowly, get jumpscared" rhythm. What I found was a game that had the right skeleton and then quietly stopped building on it. Steam shows an 83% positive rating across around 879 reviews, which sounds healthy until you check the community hub and find players in 2026 noting empty multiplayer lobbies and zero updates in roughly two years. That gap between launch enthusiasm and current state matters a lot when the whole pitch is ten-player co-op. The core loop is straightforward enough: randomized levels, hunger and thirst meters, a sanity bar that degrades if you ignore the basics, and a selection of entities that will hunt you depending on how much noise you make. Sprinting alerts nearby creatures, so there is a tension-through-movement idea baked in that actually has some promise. The four game modes give you genuine range: Classic permadeath wipes your save on death, Adventure mode respawns you a few floors back with an item penalty, Sandbox hands you console commands to mess around freely, and Explore strips out enemies entirely for low-stakes navigation. That is a decent options spread for a small indie. The character creation system lets you choose a real-world profession before each run, and each profession carries its own stat bonuses, which nudges the roguelike identity in a positive direction. Weapon variety runs from makeshift melee axes up to abandoned firearms you can find and customize, and there is a crafting system that includes ore mining on certain levels. On paper this is more mechanical depth than most Backrooms games bother with. The problem is that the level design underneath all of it is repetitive in a way that grinds the novelty down fast. Different level themes get layered over what critics and players alike describe as fundamentally the same maze structure with different textures. The lo-fi PS1-era visual style is a deliberate choice and it works atmospherically for a few hours, but it also means the environments have very little to distinguish one corridor from the next. Combat feels clunky rather than tense, and the entities, when they do show up, land more as a loud sound spike than a genuine threat response. The Obituary System, which logs your failed runs like a high-score board with cause of death and profession, is a genuinely nice touch. It is the kind of thing that makes you want to push deeper. The game just does not give you enough reason to keep doing it. The multiplayer angle deserves a direct answer since it is the headline feature: as of mid-2026, public lobbies appear to be empty. Cross-platform play with Nintendo Switch was a smart inclusion, and the proximity voice chat in up to ten-player sessions had real potential for tense communication. But a co-op horror game with no active player pool is functionally a solo game with extra steps, and the solo experience here is a slow, repetitive wander through identical corridors. If you have nine friends who all own the game and are willing to coordinate a private session, there is some fun to extract. That is a very specific ask. For everyone else, the playerbase has moved on. This one is for completionists of the Backrooms IP or players who want the cheapest possible entry point into the sub-genre with some friends already in their party. Anyone hunting a living multiplayer horror roguelike with active matchmaking should look elsewhere right now.

Fred · Scout Team

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