Editorials
Get Lost in the ‘Backrooms’ With These 5 Liminal Horror Video Games
The concept of the Backrooms tapped into a feeling deep in the collective consciousness. While everyone can explain why they are afraid of monsters and demons, it’s a little harder to articulate why empty, quiet spaces between spaces can be so unnerving. In a world where traditional jump scares feel a bit played out, this liminal horror subgenre builds its terror almost completely on an atmosphere of the uncanny.
There’s something about the subversion of common areas, twisting something familiar into something surreal through the simple act of changing their context. Seeing spaces like malls and subways devoid of people immediately puts you on a back foot, making you wonder what’s wrong with it as your mind tries to fill the emptiness with imagined horrors. This feeling was ingrained in my brain after reading and falling in love with the classic novel House of Leaves.
With the new A24 film Backrooms, based on Kane Parsons’ series of YouTube videos, hitting theaters this week, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite horror games that manage to capture this vibe in the creepiest way possible.
P.T.
This one isn’t the most useful recommendation since it’s no longer available, but no game has captured the terror of a mundane space being twisted more than P.T. This “Playable Teaser” for a new Silent Hill game from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro was pulled from the PlayStation store after the project was cancelled due to the messy professional breakup between Kojima and Konami, but it stands as a fully experience on its own as one of the scariest experimental games, even without its relation to the iconic franchise.
The whole game takes place in one hallway that loops back on itself in impossible ways, becoming more and more haunted as you make progress. Even before things start getting wild, the feeling of unease comes from being in such an innocuous space under such strange circumstances. Many of the game’s puzzles involve trying to figure out what’s changed on your loop, causing you to intimately learn the layout of the hallway, making things all the more startling when you come across changes. While you can’t download P.T. anymore, there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had just from pulling up a Let’s Play on YouTube and following some poor streamer on their descent into horror.
THE EXIT 8
In some ways, The Exit 8 reminds me of an indie version of P.T., but on a much smaller scale. While not necessarily as narrative-focused, it’s got the same ideas of repeating spaces and seeing what’s changed. The difference here is that rather than to do it for solving puzzles, spotting the changes is the core gameplay mechanic. You find yourself trapped in an underground passageway, just a simple, stark white tiled hall with a few doors and some signage. The rules for progressing are simple: if you find an anomaly, turn back the way you came; if you don’t find any, continue forward. It’s a clear setup that will have you second-guessing everything you know by about the third loop.
Even before things start getting surreal, there’s something really unnerving about the passageway you repeat. It’s always empty, except for one guy who walks towards you on a set path, over and over again each time. Just that is enough to make you feel off, but the real secret sauce that makes it work is the variable scale of the anomalies that you’ll run into. Sometimes it’s as small as a slight alteration to a poster, but other times it’s bigger in a way that acts as a jump scare. It’s a real lean-in type game, where you are actively scanning for tiny details in the environment, which sets you up for a jolt when it’s a big one. Not only did this spawn a small anomaly hunting subgenre of games, but it was also potent enough of a concept that it was adapted into a feature film this year. It won’t last you more than an hour, but it’s a clever concept that has a great bag of tricks to scare you in non-traditional ways.
BACKROOMS
If you want actual Backrooms-related content, there are tons of options out there. Escape the Backroom and The Complex: Expedition seemed to be the biggest ones, but I wanted to highlight the Backrooms game from indie horror legend Puppet Combo, which was recently released on consoles. It’s presented with their low-poly, VHS-filter style, enhancing the vibes into something that feels so much more surreal. You play an office worker who, while taking the subway home, no-clips into the titular liminal labyrinth. You’re confronted not only with dreams of your past, but also with the dawning realization that you’re not alone in there.
While it may be a little too short to have the full narrative punch I was hoping for, the atmosphere it creates is exactly what I want from a liminal horror experience. There’s something distinctly eerie about staring at a fuzzy-textured, low-poly wall and trying to tell if you see a face in the gap or if that’s just your imagination playing tricks on you. Puppet Combo’s signature VHS- inspired style gives it a found footage feeling, making it feel very raw and immediate. Abrupt ending aside, this is a great little creepypasta-style short story that will do an excellent job of getting you in the right headspace for the upcoming film.
POOLS
The term walking simulator has often been used in a negative light, but there can be something intriguing about a game just about navigating maze-like levels, especially in the liminal space genre. POOLS is a game about wandering through hallways and rooms populated by pools. It takes familiar elements like locker room-style floor tiles and water slides and makes them feel abstract and strange with its layouts. It’s like it’s an alien space assembled out of building blocks that we’re meant to understand, but done without any understanding of what they are actually for. The stunning photorealistic art style brings it to life, but it’s the sound design that really builds the atmosphere.
There are no jump scares in POOLS, but the footsteps and splashes you make play tricks on your mind, giving you the uneasy feeling that you’re being followed as they echo through the empty hallways. It almost feels like horror ASMR, where the sound just tickles some part of your brain that doesn’t make rational sense. There’s nothing downright terrifying, but it does give you that eerie feeling of walking through an empty space completely alone, not sure if you’re hearing something just around the corner. At the same time, it has a very chill vibe to it, allowing you to alternate between feelings of relaxation and discomfort. Check out this one if you want a game with more of the liminal with slightly less of the horror.
ANATOMY
One of the best haunted house stories of all time, the indie masterpiece from Kitty Horrorshow is a game that puts you in a mundane, empty space and really makes you think about it. You explore it. You get familiar with it. You compare it to the human body. It’s a simple setup that has you fetching tapes from around the darkly-lit house, bringing them back to the kitchen to listen to the narrator clinically dissect the idea of what a house is. It’s almost impossible to capture that atmosphere of sheer dread it creates in its halls, stairways, and rooms, but it remains one of the scariest games I’ve ever played.
The combination of expert writing and perfect atmosphere makes efficient use of its mundane location. I’ll never forget the feeling of going into the basement the first time, worried that I was going to get forever lost in the sea of darkness if I strayed too far from the wall that grounded me. Even though it twists into something darker on subsequent runs through the game, it still feels like the horror of it comes not from a scary monster chasing you, but rather realizing that a house itself could be a scary monster. It’s an incredibly unnerving game, and with a price of $3 and a runtime of just under an hour, I recommend everyone check it out.
Are you revisiting any of your favorite liminal horror games to prepare for the Backrooms? Drop your recommendation in the comments below!
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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