There are loads of backrooms games. It would be nice to have a list of games worth playing and not just coop walking sims. Many of them can be beat in coop by 1 player getting a monsters attention then running in a circle while the other players solve the puzzles.
See this is part of my main issue with current Backrooms. All the levels are fine even if some of them are corny impossible to navigate near instant death levels as soon as you walk into them. Sometimes in those same levels they have the same entities are have way too high of a chance to instakill you which defeats the purpose of the entire idea. Agree that some entities that are the equivalent of pesk insects and small animals are fine but then you have the skin stealer which instakills you with line of sight and it is every on most of these different levels.
Couldn't agree more it's gotten ridiculous.
There shouldn't be fucking levels in the first place.
on the plus side i think the original concept just feels all the more alien and unsettling when you realize just how hard it is to really conceptualize something so alien. that people cant really easily imagine a space youre not supposed to bein to the point they need a metaphor like that and still fail and make ii like video game stages rather than being outside known reality or the "game" with no "enemies" as those are all in the reality you somehow against the normal function of things slipped out of. a flaw in how the universe functions.
it's a fun irony you bring up as the more familiar it is the less scary it is. The reason why base level horror works is the unfamiliarity when you have a scary monster you know is going to kill you the fear is not escaping from it. When you have a location that seems familiar but isn't you become extremely anxious or paranoid especailly when you think you're the only one there. What people fail to realize is that yes there is a point where you get too much. The levels, monsters, organizations/factions, rules with each levels...it all becomes less about liminal spaces being unsettling and more like the most annoying video game to play.
You know I hadn't actually even considered the logistics of evasion or combat in the backrooms. Most levels are narrow hallways. So basically you just have a bunch of meat head dipshits glitching into unreality and beating the shit out of everything blocking their path until they can yeet theirselves back into existence
This is why Vita Carnis lost me so hard after essentially nothing but hours of informational presentations on the aliens.
most of the descriptions of levels don't mesh with the idea of entities. They rely do feel like awful developer choices of sticking enemies in dumb locations that don't offer challenge but annoyance. People forget that all the effort going into making the BR more like a video game is kind of pointless since the whole idea is falling into a place outside of reality while still in reality so the threat of dying from natural causes like thirst and starvation are immediate. Instead you get ganked by a random unkillable entity that you probably didn't see or didn't know its bullshit mechanic as soon as you enter a level.
I feel there is a reason why Local58 is considered the way it is because it's short and a little ambiguous so you have to connect your own dots. My issue with most current web horror is that they are too scared of people figuring things out when they make the point of their series to figure things out so they need to explain everything including why the mechanics of these things even matter. I fell out of Vita Carnis the same way i fell out of BR to circle it back. There's too much to deal with to the point where surviving it's just a waste of time but i feel most of the peolpe who add to these series' or make lore to them don't get that yes....less is more.
I have not been in this thread for awhile, but some other things to consider...some parts of the Backrooms should have things like street signs, windows, or doors placed on walls or buildings in weird spots or at odd angles as if to imply things have gotten mixed up somewhere.
The backrooms are oficially dead. I bet the Simpsons will also make a Backrooms episode or at least mention it.
There's a small number of other videos that match his production value, but frankly the vast majority of fan content is just one-for-one rippoffs of Kane's stuff without any of the underlying story.
In no particular order:
