Escape the Backrooms — When the Scariest Thing in a Horror Game Becomes Your Teammate

In August 2022, a game called Escape the Backrooms entered Steam Early Access. It’s based on the internet urban legend of “the Backrooms”—those eerily familiar yet empty spaces, yellow corridors, endless pools, and mazes you can never escape. It’s a first-person horror exploration game with 1–4 player online co-op.

Three years later, on October 23, 2025, version 1.0 officially launched. It then came to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in May 2026, and to Switch 2 in July. Shortly after the console release, the developers announced that Escape the Backrooms had surpassed 5 million players on console. Then, in August 2026, the game added the free Level 421, showing that support didn’t end with the 1.0 launch.

On Steam, it has over 130,000 reviews, with an overall “Very Positive” rating and around 90% positive. On the PS Store, it sits around 4.5 stars.

Playing Alone Turns the Backrooms Into a Slow Torture

Escape the Backrooms supports 1–4 player online co-op. You can absolutely play it solo. But honestly, playing alone and playing with four people are two completely different experiences.

In single-player, you enter Level 0 alone—that classic yellow corridor, buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, damp carpet underfoot, and only your own footsteps around you. No teammate watching the corridor behind you, no one shouting “over here” when you get lost. You have to find clues, solve puzzles, and avoid entities all by yourself. And the entities show up when you least want them to.

One player put it bluntly: “Single-player is boring. It’s a classic multiplayer horror game. I got to the pool level solo and stopped because it was genuinely dull. The maps are too big and empty, with very little information or interaction. But multiplayer is a different story.”

That review nails it. The single-player mode of Escape the Backrooms is essentially a walking simulator plus puzzles—you spend a lot of time walking back and forth through empty corridors, flipping switches, reading notes, and piecing together clues. In multiplayer, that process gets filled with chat and banter. In single-player, it’s just you and the silence.

But What It’s Really Selling Isn’t Horror—It’s Screaming With Your Friends

Multiplayer is clearly where Escape the Backrooms was meant to be played.

Up to 4 players team up, go through over 30 distinct levels, avoid entities like Smilers, Skin-Stealers, and Hounds, and find the exit. The rules are simple, but on higher difficulties, a teammate’s death becomes the whole team’s problem; in Nightmare Mode, one death means everyone restarts.

Combined with proximity voice chat, this creates a very different kind of tension. The distance between you and your teammates affects how clear and loud your voice is. Behind a wall, your voice gets muffled. Hiding in a locker, your breathing gets amplified by the environment. More importantly, the entities can hear you too. If you’re chatting loudly while hiding from a monster, it will follow the sound.

One review described it perfectly: the game constantly swings between “hilarious” and “horrifying.” One second you’re laughing at your friend—”How did you get bitten by that Hound around the corner again?”—and the next, you realize a Skin-Stealer has disguised itself as them and is walking toward you.

You Never Know If the Thing Around the Corner Is Your Teammate or a Skin-Stealer

The entity design is where Escape the Backrooms really shines in multiplayer.

The most iconic is the Skin-Stealer. It disguises itself as a player and even uses voice to lure you closer. Its scariest trick isn’t chasing you—it’s pretending to be one of your teammates until you let your guard down. When you see a “teammate” standing at a dim corner, you can’t immediately tell if it’s really them. You have to call out and wait for a response.

Then there’s the Smiler, which only appears in darkness. If you walk into pitch black without a flashlight, you might see a row of glowing teeth emerge from the dark—and then you run.

And the Hound—a dog-like creature with a human face that moves faster than players. When you actually run into one, pure speed won’t save you. But in multiplayer, what matters most isn’t who runs fastest—it’s who spots it first and who yells “run!”

All these entities are built around the same idea: they turn being in a group into a source of fear. The Skin-Stealer exploits your trust in teammates, the Smiler exploits uncertainty in the dark, and the Hound plays on your most basic instinct when you’re running for your life: don’t be the one who falls behind.

Push Square gave the PS5 version an 80, saying: “Escape the Backrooms is an incredibly fun and scary co-op horror experience. It’s not a polished horror game with dazzling visuals and sound, but it stays surprisingly fresh as it drops you into level after level of killer monsters and forces you to find a way out.”

It’s Not Pretty, But It Focuses on What Matters

Escape the Backrooms is not a visually polished game. The Push Square reviewer initially thought it was just a “one-off cash-in on the Backrooms movie hype.” The visuals aren’t great, the sound is just okay, and there’s plenty to nitpick.

But it does the most important thing a co-op horror game can do: it keeps you and your friends talking about “what do we do now?” in a space that’s big enough and varied enough.

The 30+ levels aren’t simple reskins. You’ll go from the classic yellow corridors to an endless pool level, then into pitch-black tunnel systems—where you need a LIDAR sensor to see ahead while avoiding something lurking in the dark. Later, you enter foggy suburbs, download an access key from a computer, and face fleshy creatures with crowbars in the corridors. Then there’s a level that’s just a straight hallway with one objective: run, don’t stop, something is chasing you.

The Push Square reviewer said that after 10 hours, the game was still giving him new things. He didn’t think “wow, this design is amazing” at every level, but every level had him and his friends yelling over voice chat, then surviving, or dying, and then trying again.

If you have friends to play with, if you can accept that “this game might not look great,” and if you’re looking for a co-op horror game that will make four people scream over voice chat, blame each other, and then laugh and say “one more run”—it’s priced at $9.99 on Steam, supports cross-platform multiplayer, and is available on Xbox Game Pass.

If you don’t have friends to play with—you can still play solo. But you’ll probably quit around the second level and go find something else to do. That’s not the game’s fault. That’s the Backrooms’ fault: it’s just too quiet in there alone.

Copyright Notice: All game screenshots, character images, and related assets used in this article are the property of Fancy Games and Secret Mode and their respective rights holders. This article is intended solely for informational, review, and commentary purposes.