During the 2023-2024 holiday season I decided to return to my roots as a application developer and try my hand at making a game in the Godot engine. I had previously been experimenting with an idea in October of 2023 that was quite ambitious so I ended up putting that on pause for a while. Instead I wanted to work on something more small scale and iterative and due to its recent popularity I came up with the idea for my own spin on The Backrooms. This so-called "backrooms" was a story born on the internet about a mythical place you can end up if you accidentally fall into the invisible cracks between dimensions. It's an endless liminal space where the only thing there is yourself and dreary office corridors covered in yellow wallpaper. At the time of writing this, the meme has been done to death in both the gaming sphere and YouTube sphere so I knew I needed to do something different with it.
Typically with these sorts of things people will have a little intro scene of the player character falling into the backrooms for no reason, and then the entire game takes place there. Oftentimes, there are monsters or weird secrets to discover in their versions of the backrooms as well. So for mine I wanted to twist it ever so slightly and poke fun at the various tropes of this genre. That's why my game starts with the player waking up in a tongue-in-cheek distillery called "Berk Rums" where they have to solve simple puzzles to escape. The twist here is that if you complete all the puzzles as intended you beat the game and that's it, you never enter the backrooms at all. To help encourage this, the game is apparently on rails with the player moving from puzzle to puzzle via cutscenes, never needing to take control. The trick is that during any of the puzzles they can take control of their character by moving with their keyboard controls. And once they take control they can walk around the map until eventually falling through the walls or floor and into the backrooms like you'd expect.
Once the player is in the backrooms the tone shifts and it becomes a bit creepy, with slow playing music and distant machine noises. As the player explores, however, they're not met with traditional creeps and scares but rather simple silly moments to break their suspension of disbelief. Their curiosity is rewarded with goofy scenes of characters dancing or a single potted plant surrounded by sounds of a rainforest. It's a simple idea that allows me to expand on it over time rather than needing a 100% finished product at launch. Every update can add something new to explore and ultimately I will add an ending to the backrooms where the player is finally reward with some "lore" about this specific version of the backrooms, more specifically the "Berk Rums''.