The Backrooms 1998 – This makes me feel old
So does that mean we're in the Frontrooms?
Get lost in The Backrooms 1998.
The Backrooms is quite the phenomenon these days with all manner of different interpretations. Whilst my knowledge of it is limited to the basic principles, the Kane Pixels series, and whatever that dreadful American Horror Stories episode was, I still know enough about it to go into most interpretations with enough to get by. The Backrooms 1998 (that’s nearly 30 years ago, people who want to feel old) tries to make a classic survival horror game out of the concept, and whilst it manages to land some elements, it just can’t seem to get away from wanting to be horror streamer bait.
Playing as a teenager who becomes trapped in the titular yellow corridors, you begin by videotaping some sick skateboarding tricks with your pals before dropping into the dreaded halls. Lost and alone, you find yourself stalked by a horrifying monster that seems to link to your past. The only option is to solve the riddles within to try and find a way out alive.
Before getting into the gameplay, I will give some early credit for using live action footage to set up the plot. It’s a rare feature in modern video games, and outside of FMV games I can only think of in recent memory is Cursed Feed, which wasn’t the strongest offering. It’s only short, but the inclusion is appreciated.
Upon arriving in your new nightmare, you’ll quickly be shown how to hide, use your flashlight, and utilise a spray can. The latter is a neat inclusion as you’ll really want to mark what rooms you’ve been to due to the later stage of the game being quite a confusing labyrinth. This is somewhat fitting with the lore too, with spray painted words and arrows appearing throughout the different forms of the fiction. I will say that it’s a little cumbersome to use with a controller, but it’s a nice inclusion.
Before long you’ll be confronted by an absolutely horrifying yellow and blue limb monster that will chase you down whenever it spots you. Confusingly, you’re told early on that the creature has no eyes but can hear you well, but I was often spotted when being perfectly still. I’m not sure if this was a bug, but I quickly changed my approach to simply not be anywhere near the damned thing. As an interesting aside, you can have The Backrooms 1998 pick up on your microphone in a similar way to Alien: Isolation to add to the risk of being caught. Whilst I don’t have a mic for my Xbox, I consider this a fun addition that doesn’t get used terribly often.
After all this, you’ll be introduced to your main objective which is to find a bunch of seemingly disconnected objects hidden throughout the back rooms. It’s at this point that I breathed a weary sigh as I felt like this was just going to be another Slender game. Whilst it does a few interesting things, ultimately it’s that game structure that was done to death in the 2010s. Yes, the items are in specific places and this feels more linear in spite of the maze, but the fact remains that you are searching a labyrinthine, dark environment searching for MacGuffins whilst being stalked by a monster.
The blurb for The Backrooms 1998 even describes this as a survival horror escape room experience, but I really didn’t get much of those feelings at all. There’s an inventory with healing items, and equipment to find that will allow you access to otherwise locked areas, which you could argue are hallmarks of the genre. I rarely felt like there was a puzzle though, and I frequently found the items I needed before I found the door I needed to use them on. It all felt a bit by the numbers.
The environment itself at least manages to make you feel uncomfortable, even when you aren’t anywhere near a monster that might try to eat your entire head. Long, dark corridors give a sense of claustrophobia whilst wide areas make you feel unsafe as there could be anything behind those view-obscuring pillars. I found the exploration far more frightening than any of the scares that are thrown at you. There’s a slew of cheap jumpscares like old fashioned screamers and mannequins moving when you aren’t looking. I recognise that this is a throwback game, but horror really has moved on in the past twenty years.
Something that does work quite well for the most part though is the save system. It may rely on the archaic safe room schtick, but the fact that each savepoint can only be used once is a really neat move. It ratchets up the tension as you decide whether to save now, or explore further to find more items or make progress before returning to bank it at the risk of losing it all. Yes, you do lose that tension the first time you die and have to redo ten minutes of work, but at the time you’re initially sneaking around it’s very effective.
There are some things to like in The Backrooms 1998. The save system and environment are well done, and the story, whilst quite cliched, is entertaining enough. It’s a shame that a lot of the gameplay doesn’t really keep things interesting as it mostly amounts to wandering around and hoping you don’t die. I didn’t dislike my time with it, I just felt that there’s a lot more that can be done with horror in The Backrooms.
The Backrooms 1998 is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
