You’ve found yourself in an unfortunate place of endless hallways, stairs, and doors, pulled ever forward by someone’s audio notes in Lost in the Backrooms.
You open your eyes to a place of constant connected hallways in this game. It never feels like it’s going to end, always taking you to another hall of doors or to stairways upon stairways. The silence seems to want to swallow you up, and the only thing that’s worse is when you DO hear something. The electronic hum of a tape deck somewhere nearby. A wind that doesn’t seem to have a source. It’s a place that weighs on the mind, always seeming about to unveil its horrible secrets to you.
These constant transitional spaces create an odd sensation as you explore the game. Stairs and hallways tend to be places between sections of importance in a game. They’re a moment of quiet before things of note happen. Spending so much time in them creates this sense of dread that something is going to happen to you soon – that you’re just waiting and waiting and waiting to reach a place and find the sinister force that controls this space. It’s loaded with atmosphere because of this. And because the meaningless hallways also speak to a reality that’s completely broken and filled with horrors we can barely understand.
Lost in the Backrooms is a short horror game (about twenty minutes), but packs a great deal of stressful fear within its winding confines. Maybe you’ll find a place of meaning within its walls if you can handle that atmosphere it slowly builds.
Lost in the Backrooms is available now on Itch.io.
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