Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later that I get myself caught up in another “meme” game. This time I ended up in the viral phenomenon The Backrooms. For those not familiar, The Backrooms was a creepypasta from 4chan before becoming a viral analog horror video by Kane Parsons on YouTube about a teen who while filming his friends “No-clipped” out of this world and into another liminal space full of yellow hallways where he is chased by a monster and no-clips back into this world from a great height and falling to his death, his camera and the footage being the only thing that survived. This game is one of many sets in the Backrooms universe. I would like to thank Steelkill Studios and Feardemic for letting me check this game out.
The Backrooms 1998 puts players into the camera-eye-view of a teen who while filming his friends skateboarding, falls into a different world made up of yellow hallways and needs to find his way out.
Now, Onto the game itself. The controls for The Backrooms 1998 are minimal as, for being a “Survival horror” is more like a walking sim. You’ll master the controls quickly but the tutorial messages that come up on the screen are literally “You blink you’ll miss it” so I ended up not knowing what the hell I was doing most of the time.
The sound was OK as playing with headphones helped make the gameplay eerie but some mixing could have been improved on with the voice acting. One of the big faults with the game is the art/graphics. The game had too cheap of a look, and there were some clipping issues I noticed that character models for creatures poked through walls. the Achilles heel in this part is the constant blipping and noise on the screen that ended up hurting my eyes and forcing me to tap out 20 minutes or so into playing which is a shame as I like to play games 3-5 hours before writing a review to give it a fair shake, but it was hard to do with this one.
Another issue I had with the game was the cheap scares that were being machine-gunned out. at the start, there were a couple of good jump scares but then it seemed to repeat like a carnival ride that was not all that scary and became more annoying.
Overall, The Backrooms 1998 kept up with the tradition of Meme Games where it looked cheaply put together and packaged so it could ride on the hype, as I said, unfortunately, I was not able to keep playing due to the static effects that were being overused, if it was not for that, I probably would have ended up quitting anyway for how unoriginal and cheap it looked. On my scale of 1-10 I would have to give this one a 4/10. Sorry, I know people worked on this but I wish it could have been a bit better.
