Romance the Backrooms

(I haven't given this a star rating since since currently only the demo is available)

There are a lot of ways the contemporary video game scene is different from what it was when I was growing up, many of which are good and many of which are bad, since the transition from playground-for-insular-but-sincere-weirdos to gigabuck-suffused-juggernaut-targeting-every-imaginable-demographic doesn’t lend itself to a simple good vs. evil dichotomy (though I will note in passing that the clear balance point of awesome between these questionable extremes was 1998, a year that was clearly Peak Videogames; yes, I was 17 that year but leave that aside, I am 100% right). Despite the profound ambivalence I typically feel when comparing then with now, though, one thing that still evokes uncomplicated nostalgia for me is the demo. Demos were the 1990s version of Early Access – developers trying to build buzz for their games by releasing a limited slice ahead of the full release – except you didn’t need to pay for the privilege and the games would eventually come out. Some were good, and admittedly some were quite bad – a particularly dire Hellboy demo that involved spinning around endlessly in a deep-brown graveyard looking for a way out was a lowlight – but regardless playing a demo was an exercise in abiding in hope: this was just a little bit of game, it’s still being worked on, and besides, it’s free, how great is that?

There are a lot of reasons the demo has gone by the wayside in the larger video game culture, and understandably they’ve never been big in IF, province of short, free games that typically don’t use teasers to sell themselves. Romance the Backroom isn’t a typical piece of IF, though – though using Twine, it’s styled as a visual novel, with copious character and background art, music, and (eventually – it’s not in this release) voice acting. It’s also got a long playtime, judging from the fact that the piece that’s currently available is billed as only the first act. So a demo to give players a low-commitment way of trying things out actually makes sense.

The balancing act a demo must undertake is to provide a satisfying, self-contained experience that lets the player experience what’s good about a game, while making clear that there’s a lot more to come in the full game. On this front I think the present demo is a success. The setup here is that the main character, Carla, falls through the cracks in the world into the “backrooms” that undergird the multiverse, literally tripping on her way out of the day-care where she works and finding herself far from home. It’s an abrupt, unexplained shift, but the details ground it:

"…instead of my hands hitting the cold hard gravel of the parking lot, they hit a wet, carpeted surface, splashing on top of it with a loud smoosh."

That is just viscerally unpleasant! The backrooms themselves are an interestingly empty setting; at first they’re just a maze of yellow-wallpapered hallways (the protagonist made a Charlotte Perkins Gilman reference just after I did), but you soon run across a bizarre fellow named Kilcal – he’s got a clock for an eye and is clear that he’s not a human – and his compadres, four other warm-hearted grotesques (my favorite is a guy with eyeballs in his hair named Glarence, I mean come on) who promise to keep an eye on you and help you get home. But it doesn’t take long for you to be separated from them and kidnapped by a creepy group of “mimics”, who take you back to their king, who menaces you for a bit before Kilcal and company show up to rescue you, starting your world-hopping adventure in earnest just in time for the “coming soon…” banner to pop up.

It’s a lot of backstory, worldbuilding, and characters to establish, but the game lays out its premise effectively; there isn’t enough time to feel like I really got a handle on the main supporting cast, who I assume will carry the “romance” part of the title (this part of the gameplay isn’t really evident yet in the demo), and Carla is a bit of a generic protagonist, but things are archetypal enough that I never felt overwhelmed, and the writing is specific enough that I never felt like I was just experiencing a naked trope-fest; this is especially the case with the villains, who are legit creepy. The prose is straightforward, but each of the characters does have an individual voice, which is no mean feat. And the setup seems sturdy enough that I can imagine a lot of adventures, and interpersonal drama, to come.

On the more questionable side, the visuals lean a little far to the grotesque for my taste, and I ran into an odd bug where the top 20% of the images started getting cut off after a bit. But I tend to find it pretty easy to ignore pictures in my IF. Similarly, the frequency and impact of choices seems relatively light so far, with the few on offer primarily giving you the opportunity to resist or give in to the obviously-bad king’s blandishments. But I was certainly feeling engaged regardless, and I assume that as the game progresses, the gameplay will open up a bit too. For that matter, future development might shift the art style into something I enjoy more – again, that’s the beauty of the magical thinking prompted by a demo! But in this case I feel confident expecting that the solid parts of what I’ve played so far would translate over into the full game, and even if the weaker pieces remain as they are, they’re still not sufficient to drag down what’s shaping up to be the weirdest Saturday morning cartoon that never was.