Recent reviews by cal

this is the best game i have ever played, and i am not joking.

I'd like to describe my Inside the Backrooms experience for anybody interested. I just spent five hours playing this game, and let me tell you: what a steaming pile of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is. Sure, make all the arguments you want about the game being five dollars. Talk about how you shouldn't expect that it will be the best game on the planet, or even a really good game for only five dollars. And to those people I'd like to give a firm and unforgiving "♥♥♥♥ you". Did I mention I just spent five whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours playing this game? You did not, so shut the ♥♥♥♥ up. The first mission is one of the worst in the context of the rest of the game. It's the authentic backrooms experience. You get the walls, you get the cubicles, you get Siren Head, and you get Jeff the Killer for some bizarre ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason. You get it all, and it's really not all that bad. The problem is, once one of these things spawns, it can take five minutes or more for them to despawn, and during that entire time, you may find them camping outside of the locker or room you are hiding in. You can't go outside of that room during that time. You have to wait--sometimes for several minutes--for these mythical creepypasta characters to vent like in Among Us. The best you can hope for is being stuck watching memes on your phone until one of your friends dies and triggers the automatic grace period. What a lovely game mechanic. Now, let's say you're one of the lucky boys who decides not to refund the game, and you make it to the second stage. The second stage is actually pretty cool. You move around through a Chernobyl-style apartment space cleansing objects of radiation while Jeff the Killer again hunts you. The puzzles are all fun, and pretty approachable for just about anybody. A quick note here on Jeff the Killer: he metastasizes as a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ smiley face PNG creature and, if *he has a line of sight on you* for any random amount of time, you will die instantly. He is a tremendously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ character, and he follows you for almost the entire game. If you do happen to die though, that's okay, because you have ten lives! Anyway, after the second stage, you are brought through several different floors that do indeed resemble the backrooms videos online. They are lore accurate maybe, for whoever cares about that ♥♥♥♥, and pretty cool to explore. One of them leads you into a garage where you are hunted for what seems like hours by a humanoid monster which lacks skin. During this time, if you haven't yet become annoyed by the sprinting mechanic, you will now feel the full weight of your five dollar purchase. Upon sprinting, you are only able to move for around three to four seconds before your not-fully-depleted stamina bar forces you to hyperventilate for more than double the amount of time you spent sprinting in the first place. This isn't really an issue, unless of course you're being chanced by a skin monster who's faster than you through a garage with only two lockers for your other two friends, in which case it very much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ does become a problem. Next up, assuming you made it out of the garage with any more lives, you will make it to the penultimate level, wherein you will have to turn the dial on a safe which does not really work, make use of items that you better pray to god you remembered to pick up in the first level, all the while getting chased by the aforementioned skin monster. However, there's one element of this level that firmly sets it apart from the previous levels. There is a party room. It features two dead corpses, and a collection of fun mini-games meant to push you as close to the brink of suicide as you can possibly go. The first mini-game requires you to pop a handful of balloons within a depleting amount of time. My friends and I did not struggle with this mini-game, as I'm sure was the case for many of you as well. The trouble starts with the second mini-game. In this fun party game, you have to go through a maze filled with dead ends as fast as you can, while searching for gift boxes placed at dead ends. The amount of time you have to do this is short. The maze is, naturally, filled with dead ends, and becomes bigger as the level progresses. And the moment you find the first of several presents required to continue, it begins a countdown clock you will almost always trigger, which spawns in multiple prancing smiley men that kill you instantly upon catching up to you. The sprinting mechanic won't help you here, so don't even bother. My friends and I died five to six times during this endeavor, but nothing could prepare us for what would come next. Enter: the final mini-game. A maze, this time drawn only on the floor, featuring invisible walls to help you walk between the lines, and a collection of candles which need to be blown out. If you can't blow out the candles on time, which you can nearly always expect to happen in this incredibly frustrating game, the prancing smiley men will spawn in, and sprint at you the minute they see you (which is usually an immediate occurrence), without the hindrance of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stamina bar or even the invisible walls holding you in place. Sound unfair? Well, if you have any lives left at this point, the minute you spawn in you may be surprised (or at this point, very much unsurprised) to find you have spawned on top of the very creature that just killed you, only to be killed again. If you don't happen to get killed right away again--let's say, one of your friends got instantly killed first, and triggered the automatic grace period--you will be again saddened to learn that all of your items now lie underneath the creature that killed you, usually on the other side of the maze, which is not pitch black because you've lost your flashlight. Did I mention there are four stages to this maze? All of which get progressively harder. At this point, I was the last surviving member of my team, to my sincere surprise. The maze leads you to a door (which in turn leads to the previous room), where all that's left now is to solve a cryptic computer puzzle. This computer puzzle assumes you can escape the skinless slime man that camps outside of your rooms for minutes at a time (don't forget), with almost no health, while reading shapes off of computer screens and coordinating color codes with esoteric made up symbols. I can only imagine this is what it was like for FBI officials to have to hunt down the zodiac killer. If, however, you are able to smell colors and remember license plate numbers well enough in your day to day life to solve this abhorrent internet puzzle, you will run into two remaining pitfalls. The first: the computer accepting the zodiac's location requires you to press the keys on the keyboard with your mouse, rather than press them on your keyboard. You might be saying to yourself now, "Cal, this all sounds like an intuitive misunderstanding, but nothing more than that". And to that point, you would be correct, if not for the unfortunate situation where the randomly-generated password includes the character "G". Why does this matter? Well, It's quite common you could go through the entire game up to this point without realizing the "G" key is a hotkey which whistles to alert the skin monster of your exact location. Suddenly, the stagnant creatures that before, boxed you into corners for minutes at a time refusing to move, now are able to echo-locate your position, and run to you faster than you have ever seen a skin monster run. The second pitfall are the pools. For those that made it through the game, you know this is the last section of the game. Those same people also know that all of the monsters within this pool are invisible, because, of course they are. So you, having lost your motion sensor, now have to run back to the maze, loot a body, run back, and go through this pool OF MOVING INVISIBLE ENEMIES, in the hopes that you don't die, which I did, bringing my life count to zero, and ending the game for my friends.

♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game