Day 17 - Toiletrooms
Horror, Creepypasta, Walking Sim ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Hey cool cats, do you remember the Backrooms? YEAH!? I bet you do! If you aren’t a cool cat and are a silly goose, you probably don’t know what the Backrooms even is, so let me give you a quick rundown!
See Exhibit A:
Exhibit A is what is known as a “Liminal Space”:
This was the photo that kicked it all off folks.This is patient zero. There is some debate on where the Backrooms idea actually started, but it gained most of its traction on 4chan’s Paranormal Board. One post is probably most recognizable - It was a photo of Exhibit A accompanied with the following text:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”
You can see why the idea really started to gain traction. There was the atmospheric photo, the little teaser of “noclipping” out of reality, a near endless and identical space to explore, and a vague hint that there may be something else in the space with you. It was pretty simple stuff - enough to let the mind wander and imagine all the possibilities.
Then it broke through to the “mainstream” and everyone ages 15 and under were pooping themselves over the Backrooms.
Once the idea of the Backrooms hit the pipeline of “Mainstream internet” it was all over. Not to say that 4Chan is underground by any means, but once you start seeing Backrooms on your facebook feed, and Minecraft youtubers start making “I Escaped Backrooms in Minecraft” videos for children, you know it’s Big Time. This Backrooms craze couldn’t be stopped. It infected horror game development like Influenza. Soon every other horror game you would see pop up on Steam had “Backrooms” in its name. The plague was spreading faster than it could be contained. Don’t believe me? Just go to the Steam Store and type “Backrooms” into the search bar:
Almost all these games featured the same basic idea - wander around an empty corridor and have some spooky sounds play. “Wow, that sounds pretty boring” you might be saying, “Walking around an empty space, that can’t make for a very interesting game”. And you are right. But the Backrooms had a sinister answer to this: THE MONSTER THAT CHASES YOU. That’s right! The evil Backrooms would send a scary monster after you! Better not get caught or you’ll DIE. Muahahhaha! Monsters are so cool especially when you can’t fight back, and you can’t hide, and the only thing you can do is RUN! Especially when they are SCARY and SPOOKY and make you go peepee in the skibidi toilet!
But there was a problem for the Backrooms - oversaturation. How could it find new hosts if everyone was infected, or even worse - if the hosts became immune to its tricks? Soon this virus started to mutate and change to overcome the “Tired of seeing the same thing” anti-bodies. The Backrooms had developed a new way to sustain itself - soon games that weren’t set in washed out yellow wallpaper filled corridors would emerge. The Backrooms found out it could sustain itself simply by returning to its roots and calling itself L I M I N A L S P A C E. This was it. This was God Mode. The Backrooms had been training with weights on, only to laugh in its final moments, throw the orange gi off and toss the horror gaming world to oblivion with one flick of the pinky. No longer was the Backgrounds confined to its cramped, dingy carpet filled corridors. No, now it could spread its full wingspan of terror - Abandoned Malls? Sure. Abandoned Freeways? Why not? Abandoned Pools? You bet your ass! The Backrooms didn’t even have to confine itself to the horror genre any longer! It could any genre it wanted as long as it fulfilled the definition of L I M I N A L. It was over, the Backrooms had won. It had found a way to continuously reinvent itself over and over and over again.
It was over. Everything was Liminal now. The indie horror gaming world was thrust into the uncanny, and dragged shamelessly, kicking and screaming from its Jumpscare Five Nights at Freddy’s clones. IT WAS ALL L I M I N A L.
Which brings me to today’s game.
Today’s game takes place in a never-ending Fallout: New Vegas bathroom:
Toiletrooms:
Fallout: New Vegas:
You wander around with a lighter in the dark, surrounded by toilets and sinks. Eventually you find some guy who has also been trapped in here and he has a goose that hunts bugs for him - that’s kind of neat.
Eventually you wander into a talking toilet that needs a plunger because it can’t breathe and wants you to plunge him to save his life in exchange for getting you out of there.
While looking for the plunger a SCARY MONSTER starts chasing you, except it’s a toilet-head man wearing a suit (I forgot to snap a photo). I despise this mechanic in a game, especially if there is no clear path, because then it’s just trial and error of dying if you hit a dead end and reloading the game until you figure out where you are supposed to go. At least in the Resident Evil 2 remake you are able to shoot Mr. X in the gonads a few times and incapacitate him so you can get away, and they didn’t introduce him until you knew the layout of the Police Station and knew how to navigate it. That’s not the case here, the stupid toilet just chases you and kills you if you make one wrong turn or get stuck on a piece of scenery. Thankfully, this chase sequence is short, you find the plunger, and clear the toilet. Hooray! He promises to take you home. A pipe comes down, gives you a little sucky sucky and suddenly you are in a giant wading pool. You talk to a showerhead who drowns you to send you home. You wake up in your bath, was it all a bad dream? That’s the skinny of it.
The strange thing with this game is: I can’t tell if it’s satirical or not. I really do feel like the dev did a good job for what the material is, all things considered. I am kind of interested to see what kind of games they can make that aren’t the Backrooms. There was a certain tone and charm to this game- like some quiet background (toilet) humor. For example, there’s the guy with the goose which he found in a pipe that hunts bugs for him to help him survive. He doesn’t even bother or try getting out. Whether that’s because he has given up, or if he enjoys his new life with his Goose buddy, I’m not really sure, but I kind of love it. Or even the toilet with a clogged pipe struggling to breathe, begging for you to plunge it and save its life - both those things are kind of humorous! The game didn’t take the really easy route and go “Heehee, poopy”, it was just a little more subtle. It’s for all these reasons I am thinking it might be a satire. The game is short, so it’s not asking much of your time, the fuzzy retro graphics are nice, though I’m not hard to please on that front these days. If graphics aren’t drawn using a combination of MS paint and compressed JPGS, I’m impressed. There’s… kind of (?) a “story” (I use those quotations very liberally). There is technically a beginning, a middle and an end. (I can’t believe I’m being nicer to Toiletrooms than I was Off-Peak). At the end, the game suggests you fell asleep in the bathtub. It’s that old “It’s just a dream” twist, which is just so on the nose. Since it’s smacking the schnoz, it just has to be satire? Right? Like you are running around a literal endless Bathroom, that just has to be some larger commentary on all the endless Backrooms games we’ve seen these days - Right?! That’s the problem, I cannot tell, but I also don’t think it matters.
The issue is: At its core, satire or not, it’s still just another Backrooms game. Another body to be dumped with the other countless numbers into the mass grave of forgottenness created by the Backrooms disease.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 0.5% 6%. After reading Sam’s review it sounds like there is some randomness, maybe? Altered for curiosity
Time Played: 15 Minutes
Sam’s Take:
I had a busy day and my mother in law is staying in the room where I usually play games. I played the atmospheric horror game on a trackpad while my wife watched Chopped in the background. As I type this they’re doing something with shrimp, which seems dangerous under a time limit.
One interesting thing about this game is what happened in Ryan’s review didn’t happen to me. Instead the Goose found a key that unlocked a door for me. I went through that door, saw a rubber duck and squeaked it. This scared my dog in real life. It seemed to have no effect on the world, and I was trapped. I had a choice here, and it was either quit the game, or scare my dog again to see if another squeak might change something.
…
I’m sorry, but would you wake this boy up?
Recommend: Ryan said no. I trust him.
Replay Percentage Chance: 0%
Time Played: 5 Minutes
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