Review

This is a very indie game and not so much in the way that I typically laud. More just very amateur. The actual areas you explore I enjoy, the visuals are interesting. But the enemies are a bit too janky for my tastes. They come across as being very artificial. Like I said, I know it's an indie effort, so I don't wanna come across as punching down or anything. If the game were less prone to putting you through the grinder with some of these enemies, I'd be nicer to it though. There are some core mechanics here that I take onus with.

First, I don't like that sprinting is so limited. It doesn't serve a purpose but to slow you down. Whenever you're in the chase sequences or in proximity to an enemy, the sprint seems to be infinite. But when you're just exploring, you can sprint for 2 seconds and then start breathing heavy like you just got done eating Thanksgiving dinner. It just serves to slow you down for no real reason. Either have an actual set amount of stamina (and work that into the chase bits). Or get rid of the limited sprinting. One presumes that the idea is to have the player be more introspective and anxious when they're not actively being chased. If they can't sprint and only walk, they'll take in more info and sit with the visuals. That's my best guess, anyway.

This feels like a decision owing to a lack of confidence. If the player is given something interesting to look at, they probably will do so. Worrying about people not appreciating what you've made and just running past it isn't worth fretting over. Or perhaps if you're worried that the game you've made isn't quite long enough and want to drag it out a bit. It's just not worth bending over backwards to try and fix. Quite some time ago I played another Backrooms game, The Complex- Found Footage. It was fairly short. Particularly because I believe I happened to oopsy poopsy my way to progress a couple times. I'm fairly certain there was more to see, but it is what it is. And that's fine, because I do still think sometimes of the visuals that came up in the game. It was massively simpler than Escape the Backrooms, but it still left a mark. The only care I would give towards game length would be in the sense of pacing. Are the moments of horror appropriately given time to breathe?

Second big issue I have with the game's mechanics is the sanity. You have a meter constantly ticking down and must drink almond water (?) to get it back up. Different areas have different sanity drains, some very little and others quite a lot. There's no real indication which you're in, so far as I'm aware. Other than you'll find yourself going through much more almond water in some places. I don't like this mechanic at all. I feel we a society have moved away from the sanity mechanics of yore. For good reason, they're never really used to all that great an effect. So they mostly just represent a mounting annoyance to the player. But at least if you look at like an Amnesia The Dark Descent, your sanity starts slipping for discernible reasons. Looking at a monster. Not being in the light. Rather than just a tax on being in a particular level. There's no reason for this to be here. It only adds faff. Get rid of it entirely. It also sucks because from what we saw, it's not like being at the different sanity levels had any effect. You would start to get a hallucinatory effect as you got lower. And then would die if it lowered all the way. That's it. It had no effect on the actual level itself.

In fact, I feel you could get rid of pretty much all the consumables and have a better experience. The drinks/snacks that make you run faster for a bit will fully wear out after 4-5 seconds. Why is it even in my inventory then? Presumably the idea is you keep it on you ready to be deployed. Then when you're getting chased you can pop it and flee better. The issue is that the majority of the enemies move fast enough that slowing down to eat something will get you killed (the eating animation slows you down). So it feels like these items are made for a situation where: you can fully anticipate when a monster is about to show up, and a few seconds of boosted running will make a big difference. I just can't think of a single instance where that actually occurs. The monster is either a total surprise or it's more scripted and a slightly boosted run will have no real effect. So to me it just feels like wasted effort. I'd rather we sand off that rough edge of the game. Or if that feels like getting rid of too much, (And I could see that. It would fairly significantly simplify the game. Perhaps to an extent that you don't really want. I can see that we're trying to be a bit more here than Backrooms walking simulator.) then we really need to rework this to some extent.

Just for the record, Alex and I did start needing to make use of literal cheats to get rid of these mechanics in order to advance in any sort of reasonable timeframe. Nothing sucks the fun out of the room faster than that.

Atmosphere-wise, I think we're in a little bit of a weird zone. It feels like we have trouble picking a lane. The backrooms (the concept) is silly. There's a lot of "anomaly" monsters that this game is pulling from that are silly. Silly as opposed to scary. There are times where I'm not totally sure whether the game is trying to scare me or make me laugh. It just feels a little confused. Some of these monsters are not scary. But we're running from them because they will certainly kill me when they get to me. I would also mention that some of these monsters are not scary because they are janky as all hell. Even though they could theoretically be. But the environments really make me feel like we're trying for horror. Take a look at that hero image at the top of the page. Does it feel like we're going for horror? What I'm going to say isn't really actionable because it amounts to "be better". But I personally would up the comedy and make this more of a silly coop experience. Up the gore to silly levels (the monster gets your buddy and they explode into absolute giblets). But also, we need to get rid of the jank.

There are way too many instances where the monster just is not scary because they're walking at me like some wind-up doll. If we wanna play in that interesting intersection of comedy and horror, the horror really needs to be better. Make us sweat. I would do more stalker enemies. There's one enemy near the beginning of the game that can look like one of your hazmat fellas after they kill someone. That's good, but be a bit more subtle and have them do normal walking animations until another player gets quite close to them. And additionally, shorten the iteration loop. Dying to an instakill enemy on a short leash and being sent back to the beginning of the level sucks sucks sucks. If you're gonna do that, then we need to get put back in the game very quickly.

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