DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
With hindsight, it was inevitable that I’d reach the Backrooms eventually. As per the original coining, in a 2019 4Chan thread, this is where you end up if you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas”. Taking the form of mundane, anonymous ‘liminal spaces’ – passed through but never truly inhabited by humans – Backrooms are made creepy by the absence of life, and by the impossibility of their dimensions, familiar scenery cut and pasted, Hanna-Barbera-style, into infinity.
We’ve touched on the idea of imagined realities that exist alongside our own in this column already, and I should note that ‘liminality’ was the theme of the Now Play This event discussed in E398. (As I say, inevitable.) But still Backrooms managed to remain out of view even as they went on to infect TikTok, where the related hashtag has been attached to over half a million posts, and YouTube, led by filmmaker Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms shorts were so successful he’s been signed to make a feature-length version for A24. No, as an old man who works in print media, I only took notice once the idea looped back around to games.
That looping, too, was surely inevitable. The presence of ‘noclip’ in that initial description speaks to how it was extrapolated from videogame logic, and in particular the ways they teach us to reinterpret 3D space. Many Backrooms videos are created in Blender or Garry’s Mod, and Parsons has cited Portal 2 as a key text. And sure enough – thanks in part to Steam developers’ fondness for jumping on any bandwagon that happens to be passing by – a quick search brings up hundreds of the things. For the sake of my sanity, I check into just two.
Pools (based on the ‘Poolrooms’ manifestation of the concept that has more recently taken hold on TikTok) is the game that caught my eye in the first place, by virtue of being very shiny indeed. I mean that literally: too-bright spa lights ping off gleaming tiles, and leave dappled patterns in water that dance as you slosh through it. Pools is a walking sim, letting you loose in a tangle of low-ceilinged rooms, and allowing you to discover its weirder edges at your own pace. Doing so is a meditative process, in that it is alternately soporific, frustrating, boring and transcendental.
There’s even graffiti – and I swear I didn’t know this in advance – that encourages you to talk to the creature
Then I fire up Dreamcore, and discover that it is pretty much identical. It goes harder on the found-footage angle, scuffing its pristine UE5 environments with layers of VHS-inspired filters, but the game’s opening moments are alarmingly alike: a shaky-cam rise from the floor tiles, as your surroundings swim gradually into focus, off-white tiles punctuated by brig
