Can a Co-op Survival Horror Truly Deliver Shared Scares, or Does it Lose its Edge in the Labyrinth?

For several years, the Backrooms concept has captivated audiences worldwide, with its unsettling liminal spaces and pervasive sense of dread. With promises of visually realistic environments, intricate puzzles, and terrifying entities, Backrooms: Hide Together aims to provide a shared nightmare for up to seven players. But in a genre often lauded for its isolated tension, does the addition of companionship enhance the terror or dilute the fear, and can it successfully navigate its own labyrinthine design? Read on to find out!

Lost in the Labyrinth, Together

Backrooms: Hide Together doesn’t present a rigid, overarching narrative in the traditional sense. Instead, the story unfolds through the experience of being trapped within the enigmatic Backrooms. Players are thrust into this eerie, endless labyrinth, with the implicit goal of survival and escape. The lore of the Backrooms is well-established, and the game leverages this existing framework to create an atmosphere of constant unease. Each level presents new horrors and environmental storytelling, painting a picture of a desolate, forgotten existence.

What Backrooms: Hide Together truly excels at is blending the familiar Backrooms gameplay with ultra-realistic liminal space environments, which subsequently creates an incredibly enjoyable experience for fans of both genres.

The Dance of Survival and Escape

The core gameplay of Backrooms: Hide Together revolves around co-operative survival horror for up to seven players. The objective is typically the same as most other Backrooms games, which is to explore five distinct levels filled with confined environments, solve mysterious puzzles, and evade terrifying entities.

Each monster possesses distinct behaviours and hunts relentlessly, demanding strategy, stealth, and nerves of steel. Players must decide whether to split up to cover more ground or stick together for safety, with teamwork and communication being vital lifelines.

Puzzles involve finding keys, solving riddles, and unlocking exits, with danger lurking at every turn. Backrooms: Hide Together features a unique human eye focus mechanic, mimicking how the human eye adjusts, making objects you’re looking at crystal clear and enhancing immersion. In-game pranks, like slapping friends or performing funny actions, are included to lighten the tension, if only for a moment!

Shared Dread in the Liminal Space

Backrooms: Hide Together is explicitly designed as a multiplayer experience, supporting online co-op for up to seven players. The emphasis is on teamwork and communication to survive the unsettling labyrinth. While a single-player option exists, the game’s design, particularly its focus on shared puzzle-solving and evading entities, strongly encourages playing with friends. As such, this means that you can indeed play Backrooms: Hide Together solo, but you will both have a hard time and will likely quit early as opposed to playing with others. Put simply, playing with others makes things both easier and much more enjoyable than playing solo!

A Visceral Immersion

Backrooms: Hide Together boasts highly realistic graphics and environments, aiming to immerse players deeply in the Backrooms. Dynamic lighting and detailed environments successfully plunge players into forgotten rooms and impossible spaces, capturing the unsettling aesthetic of the source material. However, there were a few rough edges, like the contained water levels remaining static. Instead of realistically rising and falling along the edges, the water stayed completely still, and given that hyperrealism is what Backrooms: Hide Together is going for, things such as this break immersion slightly.

The “human eye focus” mechanic is a notable visual feature, adding a further layer of realism to the perspective. Backrooms: Hide Together utilises realistic sound effects and atmospheric audio, with the sounds of entities and the ambient noises of the Backrooms in general being ever-present, thus creating an even more immersive experience.

The Unsettling Return

Backrooms: Hide Together offers replayability through its challenging levels and the inherent variability of co-op gameplay. With five distinct levels, and regular updates promising new levels and content, there’s a good amount of content to explore, and it will only get better. The dynamic nature of escaping entities and solving puzzles with different groups of friends provides varied experiences (whether those experiences are positive ones depends on who you play with!).

Conclusion

Backrooms: Hide Together delivers a competent co-operative survival horror experience within the familiar and unsettling world of the Backrooms. Its focus on teamwork, puzzle-solving, and entity evasion provides engaging gameplay for groups of friends. The visually realistic liminal space environments and immersive audio create a constant, palpable sense of dread. While Backrooms: Hide Together undeniably prioritises ultrarealism, and its “human eye focus” mechanic is a genuinely unique and commendable innovation, certain comparatively unpolished areas noticeably detract from and ultimately disrupt the overall immersion. The game’s core strength lies in its ability to facilitate shared scares and strategic co-operation. For those seeking a multiplayer horror experience rooted in the internet phenomenon, Backrooms: Hide Together offers a solid, if sometimes familiar, descent into the yellow-wallpapered abyss.

Grade: 7/10 – Good