Vision
There is no release date. There is a goal, and the goal is the pillar. Everything else on this site is downstream of what follows.
There are two Backrooms. This is the first one.
In May 2019 someone posted a photograph of an empty yellow room on 4chan, and someone else wrote a caption under it. Within weeks there was a wiki. Within a year there was a second one, on Wikidot, and thousands of authors had turned a single image into a documented parallel universe: numbered levels with their own architecture and history, entities with described behaviour, objects with described effects, survival rules, contradictions, revisions, arguments. It is one of the largest pieces of collaborative fiction on the internet, and almost nobody has ever tried to actually build the whole thing.
In 2022 a teenager made a found-footage short in CGI software that was extremely good and went extremely viral on popular media plattforms. It spawned its own canon, its own wiki, and in 2026 an extremely popular filmmaker collaborated with him to make a movie that became the studio's highest-grossing release. That work is a genuine achievement. It is also a different fiction that happens to share a name, and it is now the version most people mean when they talk about "The Backrooms".
Every Backrooms game we have played and seen blends the two, or ignores both. Backrooms Universe is built on the original Wikidot and Fandom canon, deliberately and exclusively. When the wiki is thin we make decisions in the spirit of the source and write down why. When the wiki is clear we implement what it says, even when what it says is inconvenient; We do not let a general purpose game engine limit our mission to make content that makes you feel inmersed. The authors who wrote each level, entity and object are credited by name, inside the game and in our wiki, which exists to make the connection between our reference cannon and the game you actually play.
What it is supposed to feel like
The appeal was never "noclip into yellow rooms with your friends this afternoon". It is the liminality: architecture that has no reason to exist at that size, corridors with no destination, rooms built for a purpose nobody remembers. Spaces that reach a part of your mind you that ordinary places do not.
The premise underneath our whole design philosophy is a specific daydream. You are tired of a world that is predictable, simple, boring, and then you are not in it any more. You are somewhere adjacent. A place where your motives change on the first day: you are not advancing, you are surviving, and between the survival there is an abyss worth walking into just to see how far it goes.
There is no escape and no win condition, because escaping would mean the daydream was a consumable and not a new place. You did not choose to arrive.
Why the engine might look overkill
It is not overkill. It is the whole argument. The surreal only lands if everything around it is behaving honestly. An impossible hallway is only unsettling when the light falling down it is real light, when your footsteps reverberate the way that room's dimensions say they should, and when the camera you are looking through has actual optics. Take the realism away and an impossible hallway is just a corridor asset repeated.
We are working on a piece of software: a game engine and a game, which is engineered and designed for our specific goal. That is to see this surreal world with a realistic lens, the creepy, unsettling or even outright impossible architecture of the Backrooms is something that we might never see in real life, the same way we will probably never get to see and experience how being a knight in the dark ages was, or how being a specific hero in a specific time period was like. That's why humans made video-games isn't it? To experience something otherwise impossible in our own lives, to escape for a while to a parallel universe where the rules are completely different; and we build that with software, and we make it in a way that allows you to have this experiences with real inmersion.
The reference we have is closer to a film than to a shooter. We are NOT making something that looks like a weekend project, because it's not. We are NOT making something that just tries to maximise metrics. We are trying to build a universe that behaves like a simulation, plays like a game, and looks like something that was filmed.
The three things it is deliberately not
- 01Not a social sandbox. Persistent worlds and user-generated content plattforms get the persistence and universalism right and then stop simulating. You teleport instead of travelling, physics is decorative, you enter a specific place for a few hours, get bored and leave, and there is no connection between those places, there are no rules a place can enforce on you. Space with no consequence is like a chatroom with a skybox.
- 02Not an engagement platform. The model most user-generated content or minigame plattforms have, optimises for retention, there's never deep effort into a specific experience or game, it's forgettable. We are optimising for one thing, and it is not time spent.
- 03Not a co-op walk sim. The well-known Backrooms games are hand-built static levels, with always the same layout, usually multiplayer is just a small peer-to-peer session, taking whichever pieces of lore fit the ride and look great for a short-form video in social media. That is a fine as a kind of game. It is the opposite of a persistent universe with a canon it is accountable to.
No date, and no pressure
This is a very small studio building infrastructure optimised for an MMO on a custom game engine it also wrote. That is an objectively unreasonable thing to attempt, and most people would tell us it's a bad idea or a waste of time and resources, and the things that are making it possible now are the amount of work and dedication we put into this project, because we want to make it someting real.
The consequence of having no publisher and no date is that scope never gets cut to hit one. Where a feature is not good enough yet, it stays unfinished and honest rather than shipping as a stand-in. We would rather there were no Backrooms Universe than one that is not the thing described on this page.
If you want to contribute, collaborate, work with us, or support us, please don't be afraid of getting in contact at contact@redpolygon.net.