Games based on creepypastas are a dime a dozen, most of them low-effort and low-budget attempts at capturing a fanbase often obsessed with scary stories. The Backrooms: Survival entirely fits the bill, being inspired by The Backrooms, a story about a mysterious place of endless mazes where you end up trapped and chased by supernatural entities. Sharing similar themes with creepypastas such as Slenderman, where escaping is a constant, The Backrooms: Survival is the perfect game for the streamer and the screamer generation, but a weak shot at a clever and engaging horror experience.

Dead Space

Your goal in The Backrooms: Survival is a simple one: run and survive. Find your way to higher levels that will feature a different look and creatures, rinse, repeat. You’ll have to eat and drink to keep your sanity in check, finding fruit and water during your journey. Locked chests and doors require you to find the keys, some weapons may help you take out an entity or two, and there’s even a vendor machine where you can buy food.

There are 19 starting professions to pick from, each one representing some sort of buff. In fact, they should be called classes or occupations, because being a serial killer or a cannibal doesn’t feel like career choices that you get a master’s degree for. As an example, you have the Electrician starting with a flashlight and two spare batteries, the Cannibal restores health by eating corpses, Athlete sprints faster, Unemployed gets no buff or boost (“good for a challenge,” it says), and Streamer has an increased chance of finding rarer items, among many other choices. You can also pick the character age, but this doesn’t seem to have any effect on your performance.

The Backrooms: Survival goes for a lo-fi graphical approach reminiscent of the first PlayStation console. It’s an approach that in theory works for the intended genre but doesn’t really make a big difference in terms of atmosphere comparing to the potential of higher quality visuals. The constant flicker and low-res textures do give the game an old-school feel, but that’s about it.

If you love endless randomly generated mazes, dead ends, doors that lead to more dead ends, and empty room after empty room, The Backrooms: Survival may be the game for you. It’s heaven for screamer streamers, but players looking for an appealing and well-crafted horror experience will have to look elsewhere. As many levels there may be, it’s still the same mazes with different textures and a few objects scattered around.

There isn’t much skill to the game, melee combat is clunky, the crafting system is skin-deep, and when you’re detected by an entity, you’re in for a deluge of loud shrieking noises in a constant loop that will make you reach to the headphones and throw them to the floor. This isn’t a positive, by the way, unless you’re a popular streamer with a following that loves to hear you scream your lungs out and make funny faces.

Judging by my personal experience and from countless gameplay videos showcasing The Backrooms: Survival, the steam pipes are scarier than the monsters themselves. Every level seems to have a few pipes blowing off steam with a loud sound as you go by, several times per level, resulting in annoying and cheap attempts at a jumpscare.

Sprinting will alert the creatures nearby, so it’s recommended to move slowly while crouching. At least, this is what I was inclined to believe while experimenting the online multiplayer with up to six players, where you can be revived by a fellow wandering soul and suffer through the monotonous layouts. So, the game turns out to be a slog where you move around the extremely confusing and repetitive levels for what seems to be an eternity – and perhaps that’s the point of the whole thing, to test your patience.

I Scream

This pretty much sums up the experience from The Backrooms: Survival. It’s more boring than scary, more tiring than exciting, aimed at the hip kids who are into trendy internet culture but not really demanding as to what makes a good game. If you love getting your eardrums pierced by extremely loud and distorted sounds while you run like a headless chicken through bland mazes, then this is the game for you. Otherwise, there are other much better and cheap options out there, such as Crimson Snow or Mirror Forge.

Pros

• Multiplayer mode so you can suffer in good company
• It’s a challenge, alright

Cons

• Endless mazes of infinite boredom
• Shrieking noises that may deafen you
• Not scary, just infuriating

Rating: 3/10