2/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Backrooms: Extractions.

(Part of my noble quest to play every single Backrooms game on Steam) This one was okay for the first half. Kinda feels like the set-up to Phasmophobia, where you level up to unlock new paranormal gear you can buy to take into missions, then you plop down into a map, do some analysis stuff and complete some small goals before extracting. And I was chilling with that vibe, to the point where I said, you know what, not too shabby for a Backrooms game. You can infinitely resurrect each other when you go down, which I appreciate in a game with insta-kill enemies and big maps full of tasks that would suck ass to repeat, and most missions were relatively clear and bug-free. Just you, a monster, and an assortment of objectives to do. We were having a good time. And then it decided it wasn't content being a little bitch-ass easy baby game, so it transformed the second half into an absolute slog. Every mission is about twenty minutes too long, you mostly have to split up to get things done cause all the maps are this dizzying, confusing wasteland of the same five landmarks over and over, and the enemy spam goes crazy, to the point where it's just you sitting in a wardrobe, radioing your buddy to shoot the shit about movies you've watched while you're both simultaneously camped by three werewolves (They can't open wardrobe doors. That's their code of honour). The suburb level literally broke us. We sat for an hour finding VHS tapes and just trying to figure out how the game intended for us to use the magical ghost garages to find a door code. One hour of the same repetitive cycle of running between houses, avoiding the same bullshit enemies, going into garages, getting killed by one stray enemy that boxes you into a corner, hearing the werewolf siren, sitting in a wardrobe for four minutes. It was maddening. Moral of the story, these games can and will have a good thing and immediately overthink it as soon as they possibly can to make it as janky as possible.