Backrooms Games: Lost in the Endless Yellow Rooms
The Backrooms began as an internet legend: no-clip out of reality and you land in endless, damp yellow office rooms humming with fluorescent light, with something else out there. These games take you there, with friends or alone, and a few go to the empty pools and liminal places the legend grew into.
The games
7 of the 8 games in this guide are not on Linux and are left out. Show them all.
Escape the Backrooms is the one most players start with: up to four friends no-clip into more than thirty levels, from the yellow office to flooded pools and dark warehouses, solving puzzles to find each exit while entities hunt by sight or sound. Backrooms: Escape Together takes up to six and rebuilds its levels every attempt, so you learn the entities rather than the maps, and Inside the Backrooms gives up to four friends changing puzzles to solve before something notices them. Backrooms: Extractions sends a found-footage crew of up to six back in to rescue agents who never returned, with entities that hear what you say on voice chat.
For the Backrooms alone, The Backrooms 1998 is seen through a teenager's 1998 camcorder, with a failing flashlight and something that hunts by sound, including your microphone. The Classrooms is its school-shaped cousin: a camcorder, a condemned school and halls that never end, different every time you play.
If what draws you is the emptiness rather than the monsters, POOLS has no enemies at all, just endless white-tiled pool rooms, still water and nobody else, and Anemoiapolis: Chapter 1 wakes you in a vast underground neighbourhood of closed malls and indoor pools where doors change behind you.
If you only try one, play Escape the Backrooms with friends, or The Backrooms 1998 for a night there alone.
Questions
What is the best Backrooms game?
Escape the Backrooms is the best known and the most reviewed on Steam; it is built for up to four friends. For playing alone, try The Backrooms 1998.
Are there Backrooms games on console?
Yes: Escape the Backrooms and The Backrooms 1998 are on PlayStation, Xbox and Switch, and Backrooms: Escape Together is on PlayStation and Xbox.
Is there a Backrooms game without monsters?
POOLS has no enemies at all; its unease comes from endless empty pool rooms.
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