Two big trends on Youtube right now are anomaly and Backrooms games.  As I searched Steam for free demos to play, I encountered Backrooms Anomaly, which combines both of the things I was looking for.  While I’ve never actually played an anomaly game myself, I’ve seen plenty on Youtube, and the concept is simple.  You pass through a location and memorize how it looks.  The placement of items, text on signs, the coloring of this and the numbers of that.  And then, on every subsequent loop, you need to see if anything has changed.  If yes, you turn back, and if no, you continue forward.  Changes can range from subtle ones such as a rather unassuming item duplicating or more obvious ones such as an entity being present that wasn’t there before.  These games are fun to watch because I get to essentially play along as I search for anomalies that the Youtuber might have missed .  But the time for watching was now over.  At last, it was about time I put my observational skills to the test with my very first anomaly game!

As the name suggests, this particular anomaly game takes place in the Backrooms, those unending and nonsensical liminal landscapes that have taken the Internet by storm in recent years.  While the pattern on the wallpaper might have changed, the scenery in this particular iteration of the Backrooms is what you’d expect.  Yellow wallpaper.  Dirty carpet.  And fluorescent lights.  Though it only consists of a single, somewhat twisty hallway and two small rooms.  So don’t worry, you won’t be getting lost here.

Each loop has you walking down the hallway as a guy in a hazmat suit strolls the other way.  As you study your surroundings, you’ll be reading inspirational posters on the walls and inspecting the two side rooms for any signs of changes.  I don’t like when anomaly games have only super obvious changes because, while they can often be surprising or amusing, it takes away all of the challenge.  Fortunately, Backrooms Anomaly featured both subtle changes and more obvious ones, ranging from an object facing a different direction to a rather familiar entity in one of the rooms.

Now that I’ve finished the demo and understand the mechanics, I feel like it was a pretty solid anomaly game.  But while I was playing it, I experienced a good deal of confusion and frustration because the mechanics were not well explained.  I understand the whole concept of continuing forward if you don’t see anything and turning back if you don’t.  (Not everyone is aware of this, however, so this should be explained in-game, not just on the game’s Steam page.)  But it wasn’t until after reading a Reddit post from the developers that I understood the two numbers at the start.

I knew that I needed to be correct 10 times in a row to complete the demo.  So when I saw a green 10 at the start and a red 0, I assumed that the green 10 needed to count down to 0, similar to what I’ve seen in other anomaly games.  Plus, green just intuitively seems like a good color, and red seems like it should be bad.  So when I saw no anomalies and went forward, I was confused when the green 10 remained the same and the red number went up to 1.  I’m also pretty sure the number doesn’t always count correctly because, after reviewing my footage, the numbers didn’t behave the way they ought to after I turned back after finding an entity in one of the side rooms.

Due to my confusion, I spent the entire demo a bit frustrated.  I would thoroughly search the area, find no anomalies, then proceed forward.  The green number would not count down, leading me to believe there was an anomaly I was missing, and I had gotten it wrong.  This really does need to be explained in-game, as it makes a whole lot of sense to me NOW, but it sure didn’t then.  I also think we need more anomalies because I frequently found nothing out of the ordinary, and when I skimmed over another person’s video, they, too, believed there were no anomalies 10 times in a row and wondered if it was a glitch.

With all that out of the way, I think Backrooms Anomaly could be a good entry into the genre if anomalies were to occur a bit more frequently and if the rules were clearly laid out at the start.  So far, I also don’t think it deserves to be called a horror game because nothing about it was scary.  Sure, I got chased by something once, but it wasn’t frightening in any way.  I do hope the full game will have more unsettling things happen.  The game is currently set to release on June 7 on Steam.  It will feature two different endings, though I don’t know what the price will be.