Movies
They Made a ‘Belko Experiment’ Escape Room in VR, and it’s Free!
“Belko VR – The Escape Room Experience” is being released for free, for one day only, March 3, 2017 in celebration of “National Employee Appreciation Day”, Bloody Disgusting learned. The game was inspired by the upcoming horror thriller, Orion Pictures’ The Belko Experiment, to be released in theaters by BH Tilt, on March 17, 2017.
Belko VR – The Escape Room Experience, created by filmmakers David Yarovesky and Dan Clifton, will be available to play on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets through the Steam Platform.
Exploring the themes in The Belko Experiment, the Belko VR – Escape Room Experience provokes the question: “What does it take to survive at work?” Players are prompted to solve a series of challenging puzzles in order to escape from their office before a microchip in their head explodes.
“We felt that we had a unique opportunity to do something a little crazy by taking the core idea of being trapped in the Belko Industries building and distilling that down to a Roomscale experience,” states Dan Clifton, who co-produced the film and also developed the game. “Players will become a Belko employee and be immersed into a fight for survival. It’s fun, at times threatening and scary and fully interactive.”
“Because I was there for the shoot in Bogota, Colombia and worked extensively with director Greg McLean and the cast and crew, it felt very natural for us to extend the experience and story into a VR game. The film leaves you with the question, “What would I do?” and we knew we could have some fun building that into a VR experience.”
James Gunn said, “The Belko VR – Escape Room Experience is scary as hell with lots of insane puzzles and moral choices. As an active gamer, I’m so excited about where VR is going, and this is a step in the right direction. David Yarovesky and Dan Clifton did an amazing job capturing the film’s unique tone and the game is just as twisted and fun as the movie.”
To bring their vision to life, Clifton and Yarovesky partnered with developers Paper Crane Games out of Los Angeles, CA, who recently developed the Call of Duty Jackal Assault VR Experience for Playstation VR.
Clifton and Yarovesky previously collaborated on The Exorcist 360 Experience for 20th Century Fox Television in the fall of 2016.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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