3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Escape the Backrooms.

(Part of my noble quest to play every single backrooms game on Steam) It gets so hard to review things like this because, honestly, I had a bloody great time. Just me and my bro chillin for two five hour sittings, absolutely breaking the shit out of every segment because we didn't bother to read any of the instructions. We spent about two full hours on the birthday party segment because you have to be quiet, and we were just chatting absolute waffle to the point where I think the cake aliens just gave up and let us go past to end the headache. Had an hour-long conversation about moth jelly and what moth jelly is and whether moth jelly would be bussin or not. Really, high-brow stuff between two straight intellectuals. But the actual game will present some utter shite at points and then, like shooting a colourful laser pointer on the ground in the vicinity of a cat, fully try to distract you by being like: "Look! You and your homies are having a swell time!" When you break it down, its really split into two halves: the segments that are kinda fire and the segments that don't really work. Sections like the creepy neighbourhood watch area, the first birthday party segment, the motion sensor corridor and the area with the clown are all pretty inventive and fun, and while I wish the game did a little more with some of its better mechanics, like the mimic that walks around pretending to be one of your crew or splitting you off from your team at the beginning of certain areas, they're entertaining. But then you'll run into one of seventy sections where you're like, oh, there's a smiling face png floating around, and I have to shine my torch at it. Or there's some moths in this section that you have to spray with bug spray... and that's about all we've got. It's this push-and-pull between trying to be a multiplayer SCP Containment Breach kinda experience, where the idea is you're in this nightmare realm where reality is distorted to the point where you're constantly encounter monsters with various unexplained rules that are gonna steal your bones, and just a bland assortment of janky horror concepts that don't work all that well but at least you're with the boys. I don't know. It's fun though, and honestly, that's kind of all I look for in a co-op game these days.