Reviews
[Review] The Nightmarish Drug-Trip of ‘What Happened’ Is Soured by Its Tonal Inconsistencies
Rarely is a title as apt as What Happened is for this game. Though it’s missing at least three question marks.
On a positive level, you say ‘what happened?’ because the game takes some inventive and frankly gonzo horror visual steps in depicting its protagonist’s downbeat nightmare acid trip. It’s a shame then, that it’s not quite as consistently adept at handling its examination of a teenager’s mental health.
It would be extremely easy to mock the attempts at empathy and mental health depiction What Happened throws at you, even if it means well. It’s trippy nature does not excuse the often jarring tonal shifts, for instance. What you can’t call What Happened is boring. The game is quite fittingly, a chaotic mess of things happening that you can’t quite help but be entranced by.
What Happened begins with our protagonist, high-schooler Stiles, locked in combat with his own mental demons, which leads to him doing acid (apparently not the first time) in the bathroom of his high school. It’s already clear that Stiles is using acid as an escape from bullying, his failed relationship, his broken friendship, and perhaps something darker. Can Stiles get through this trip? He, and you, will have to navigate the ever-changing labyrinth of his mind, solving puzzles and facing up to the reality of his past.
From the off, What Happened leans heavily into its acid trip gone wrong. The swirling blend of reality, past, present, and the surreal get disorientating, and captures the mind space of Stiles’s anxiety and drug-addled brain. Fleeting memories of bad life experiences manifest as twisted nightmares, with deliberately jarring narrative jumps from moment to moment as Stiles’ and the player’s point of view continuously slips in and out of focus, and pulses with color. The game toys with player expectation and perspective in much the same manner as Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear, with the flick of a switch or turn of the head affecting the reality of what stands before you.
This is the most effective aspect of What Happened. It portrays Stiles’ drug trip and anxiety pretty well. Whether by design or by accident, controlling Stiles and interacting with his world aren’t particularly smooth, in fact, it’s often downright unpleasant. That does seem to be the point though, you’re not supposed to enjoy this, you’re supposed to empathize with it. Which is, unfortunately, the cause of What Happened’s biggest problem, its tone.
I absolutely could understand the developers wanted to instill empathy in the player by showing them how fucked up and unpleasant life is for this suicidal, drug-addicted teen, and there are times it manages to capture that effectively. There are sweet and tender moments where Stiles recalls happier moments and times people did care for him. There’s an inventive scene depicting Stiles’ relationship with his ex-girlfriend via a puppet show. It’s the rare combination of the game doing something a bit silly and making it mean something.
Stiles doesn’t initially come across as a sympathetic character however, which, initially, made it hard to want to help him through this self-inflicted acid nightmare. Yes, his poor mental health clearly causes his self-destructive tendencies, but even with the bullying, the early part of What Happened makes him look like a bit of a self-absorbed prick. That does change as you uncover more about him, but the crux of the story is your empathy for him is supposed to shape the outcome, and again, it may be by design, but it’s a little late in the day to roll back your earlier impression in gameplay terms.
The other contributing factor is how silly the game can be. A bit of levity is absolutely welcome in a game about mental health and drug abuse, but it’s either unintentionally silly or completely out of place with the tone.
Having a game open with a distraught teen trying to escape from the world he believes hates him by taking acid doesn’t drive home its tone quite as well as it should when it involves a disembodied voice telling you to ‘enjoy your poo’ in a sing-song voice, and features a psychedelic journey down a toilet bowl.
The storytelling suffers somewhat due to the choppy, non-sequential delivery (though it does also serve the acid trip effect). Sometimes it just feels like points are made by bludgeoning the player with them as quickly as possible in order to move on to the next, rather than building up genuine empathy and understanding.
For all its faults, it’s hard to argue against the intent and ambition of What Happened. It doesn’t always get things right, but it clearly has good intentions to deliver an engaging and heartfelt depiction of mental health issues and a nauseatingly effective drug trip. It’s to the credit of the developers that it succeeds on the latter at least, and shows potential in the former.
What Happened review key for PC provided by the publisher.
What Happened is out now on Steam, with a console release yet to be determined.
With all the hullabaloo surrounding Kane Parsons’ big screen adaptation of/sequel to his Backrooms web-series, it’s easy to forget that the Backrooms phenomenon itself actually began years ago. Since 2019, countless creators have tried to leave their own unique mark on this memorable piece of collaborative fiction, with game developers being especially interested in exploring the architectural nightmare of the rooms in virtual environments.
However, now that this once-niche creepypasta has escaped the online bubble and permeated all of popular culture, several of these developers have decided to rework and rerelease some of their old titles in order to reach a new audience. Puppet Combo did this with their interpretation of The Backrooms last month (originally released in 2019 as Day Seven), and now Cortez Productions is doing the same with the console release of The Backrooms: Lost Tape.
However, Lost Tape is more than just a cleverly timed rerelease, with Vini Cortez having taken the time to completely overhaul the 2022 game’s graphics and transfer the project over to Unreal Engine 5.6 – complete with bug fixes, exclusive new content, and a brand new visual style that’s a little too impressive when compared to what the original version of the game was trying to do. In fact, I’d argue that this is more of a remake than anything else, though it’s still built over the skeleton of that original game.
In the updated title, which is presented as a found footage anthology where each “tape” tells a self-contained story, players initially take control of a movie theater usher named Josh as he no-clips into the titular Backrooms and tries to find his way out of a liminal labyrinth. The second (and final) tape follows Josh’s brother Nikolas as he attempts to track down the missing usher and ends up embarking on his own journey through infinite hallways and not-so-empty pools.
What follows is a highly atmospheric first-person walking simulator with the occasional light puzzle and a handful of thrilling chase sequences. While the liminal environment is obviously the star of the show here, the rooms are actually populated by monsters in this game, and our characters have plenty to say about the situation they find themselves in.
Unlike Parsons’ more introspective take on the Backrooms mythology, Cortez has decided to incorporate the multiple levels of the Backrooms wiki as well as several crossovers with the SCP “franchise”. While I personally don’t mind this inclusion due to the creepypasta’s collective origins, die-hard fans might be bothered by the fact that you can run into SCP-173 (affectionately referred to as Peanut by some fans) while wandering around the yellow hallways.
However, the real problem here is the fact that the game is simply presenting imagery and ideas made by other people without adding anything new to these familiar elements. There is an undeniable novelty to exploring these beautiful renditions of classic liminal environments, but Lost Tape offers little in the way of originality in both narrative and presentation. This extends to the unfortunate use of generative AI in some of the new textures and audio files – issues that weren’t present in the 2022 version of the title.
Though Cortez has promised that he’s working on bringing back the VHS filter that made the original experience so grungy and atmospheric, the glossy new visuals make the game feel a lot less scary while also consuming way more computing power than can be reasonably expected from an indie title. Sure, the game is pretty in a “tech-demo” sort of way, but there’s no reason for it to be hogging resources like a blockbuster AAA title.
This is made even more frustrating by the fact that this found footage anthology is technically still incomplete. The two existing tapes only scratch the surface of the setting’s narrative potential, and Cortez has announced that the next ones will only be available as (likely paid) DLC. Josh and Nikolas’ tapes are self-contained yarns that’ll each get you about a feature film’s worth of entertainment, though a lot of that runtime is taken up by very slowly walking from one point to another. But it’s a shame that there isn’t a concrete promise of more content to come.
At the end of the day, Backrooms: Lost Tape isn’t a bad game. Cortez really nails the liminal atmosphere and even breathes new life into tired SCP tropes, and the upcoming VHS filter will likely resolve most of my gripes with the revamped visuals. That being said, I find it hard to recommend a project that took a completely functional experience and spoiled it with AI-generated assets and poorly-optimized “upgrades” that no one was really asking for – especially since it doesn’t give existing owners the chance to roll back to a previous version of the game.
So, if you’re looking for more Backrooms-related thrills after enjoying the A24 adaptation, Lost Tape isn’t necessarily a bad place to start, but there are certainly better and more original options out there.
Backrooms: Lost Tape is available now on Steam and PS5.
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