Escape Room Review – Haunted Vibration Museum

If you don't know what The Backrooms is, you probably aren't a kid of a certain age. Born as a more specific offshoot of the liminal space genre, Backstage is the catch-all name for the bible of horror lore that has been handcrafted by the online community over the years. Every inhuman monster and every disturbing location becomes a chapter in the horror universe that the Internet has co-constructed. It's grown so big that it's spawned dozens of related games, an upcoming horror movie from A24, and a never-ending stream of YouTube content to watch. But through it all, Escape the secret room Still one of the most beloved depictions of the fictional world, it now serves as a labyrinthine museum telling one of the internet's most popular horror stories.

Escape The Backrooms is a first-person defenseless horror game for up to four players in co-op. It's been around as a Steam Early Access game for a few years, but its version 1.0 has finally arrived. In “Escape from the Secret Room”, you will explore a large number of pocket universes created by the Internet and the wider secret room legend. Each “room” in The Backrooms presents a different liminal horror. These include the iconic yellow maze that kicked off the entire subgenre, as well as other popular landing spots like Level Fun, Poolrooms, and Grassrooms. One of the game's best feats is the number of locations it explores. Legends are fast and loose in the sense that, essentially, everyone has a legend. Escape Room does a great job of involving many different rooms, giving players a history lesson about its unsettling universe.

The game loop is very simple. You'll explore each weird liminal space while looking for different ways to exit. Mechanically, you do next to nothing except wield a flashlight and drink cases of almond water you find to restore your ever-draining sanity meter. Sometimes you'll need to solve environmental puzzles, like knowing which of the playground's slides you can safely duck down (since most slides will eject you into several bloody blocks). Sometimes, key items (including literal keys) must be found in order to progress, forcing you to repeatedly hunt for semi-randomly placed quest items. For example, in an early level you need to rebuild a ladder to get the key to the exit door, while in another you'll be searching for an elevator in a dark parking lot that would be completely empty without the roaming “Skin Stealer” monsters lurking in the shadows.

This skin stealer is especially creepy because it wears the same yellow hazmat suit you and your partner wear, and it pretends to be another player on the broadcast. But once it sees you, it transforms into its true form, a towering gray-skinned alien with zipper-like teeth on its belly, and it chases you until it either kills you with one shot or you enter one of several safe rooms it can't enter. This is just one of many different monsters you'll encounter, each confined to a specific “room” where they belong.

Liminal Space initially became a sensation online for its unsettling emptiness, while The Chamber and its thick lore book lean more toward housing monsters within its dreamlike setting. Those willing to trace this divide online will find that adults are more likely to be drawn to those strangely nostalgic and dehumanizing worlds of liminal spaces, like empty spaces. Alone in the void, they feel foreboding, playing with a vague sense of familiarity and hazy memories; closer to a place you recall in a dream than anywhere you've ever actually been in real life.

In contrast, children mostly preferred overly stiff versions of these spaces, letting creatures roam halls that were already immersive places in their own right. But in Escape Room, especially in Escape Room, it's less subtle, and therefore less disturbing. I usually can't immerse myself in a creepy atmosphere because if a level has such a space, the monster is likely to charge at me within a minute or two of leaving the safe space.

As a result, the scares feel cheaply realized, although they're still effective thanks to some jolts in volume levels every time a monster chases you or your friends. It doesn't do anything clever, repeatedly throwing unstoppable monsters at you across dozens of levels, and only the setting changes, even if the setting is the best part. This is not a game that creates deep psychological trauma like Silent Hill, nor does it slowly build tension like Amnesia. Escape The Backrooms is a horror game built specifically for streaming. It creates a lot of jump-out-of-your-chair moments, and it's just as fun as Phasmophobia and Lethal Company in that it allows players to betray friends, even seriously fail, and then giggle through the screams you share as a team.

Because it was in Early Access for so long, Escape The Backrooms predates the current “Friend Slop” trend in co-op games, although it fits in perfectly. There's a nice mix of lo-fi visuals and liminal horror, so the game itself offers some pretty simplistic landscapes, which isn't too bad either. Neither the player portraits nor the monster details are impressive. The animation is also basic, though not as jarring as in Phasmophobia. The same is true for many of the levels you'll explore, although in these cases I found it crucial to the experience. Liminal space is to horror what shoegazing is to music: it requires ambiguity to work.

While the gameplay isn't complex or surprising, the environments are, especially if you don't have enough knowledge of Backrooms. There are dozens of levels in Escape The Backrooms to play through with your friends, each one unique and fun, and taken as a whole you feel like you've been given an immersive history lesson in the fairly new horror subgenre. Even players who have been keeping up with the game through Early Access will find that several new rooms have been added in version 1.0. I really enjoy this aspect of the game, especially when playing it with my son.

I view the game through a similar lens through our shared experiences: once as an adult who lived through its creepy environments, but also as a teenager who taught me about all the monsters and their characteristics based on everything I'd read online over the years. He knows their names, he knows their actions, and together we guide each other through difficult times. It's not a complex game, but oddly enough it's an educational one if you're looking for a playable museum dedicated to the “backroom”.

Ultimately, I got into Escape Room as a huge fan of liminal space horror movies—seriously, you should check out my Instagram algorithm. I left the game unmoved to delve further into The Backroom's more specific waters. I absolutely appreciate the ideas, I love how they were handcrafted by the entire internet, it's like the world's biggest campfire story. But there are too few fresh ideas in the gameplay loop, aside from the extremely strange position you find yourself in at the end of each loading screen. Being chased through dizzying level after dazzling level often takes away from an environment's strongest aspect: its surreal atmosphere. Escape Room feels like visiting some unforgettable places, but on a tour bus hurtling through traffic.