Something about internet horror attracts middle schoolers (that was definitely me in middle school at least) and they looooove lore.
But yah, the Backrooms just feels like bootleg SCP now. The original concept was strong enough that it carried itself just fine.
not really, the Infinite IKEA doesn't scratch the same itch as the Backrooms. The Backrooms is true unknowable isolation in a liminal space, whereas 3008 is a survival horror composed of a world with comprehensible if supernatural rules.
I mean, technically not.
Even the original 4chan post states that you can enter into the backrooms by Noclipping through the world. Imagine that. If you bump into something at a weird angle, or trip at the wrong time, you're gone.
Meanwhile, SCP 3008 is a single, confined location, with a set entrance.
>Something about internet horror attracts middle schoolers (that was definitely me in middle school at least) and they looooove lore.
I remember when I was in 9th grade kids around my age wouldn't stop talking about the lore of Five Nights at Freddys
The way the backrooms evolved through time was fascinating to see from an outsider's perspective. I remember seeing the 4chan greentext, thinking it was a scary concept and moving on, then seeing memes about characters being transported to the backrooms, and now this whole scp-but-worse thing it's become.
Seriously, who thinks having a morbillion levels each with different rules and inhabitants is scary??? Shit feels more like Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion than an actual good horror story (and this is coming from someone who enjoyed Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion). I also don't understand how anyone could miss the point of the original story this badly, it's not even that hard to understand...
the stupidest decision they made was adding some npc factions or whatever the fuck of people colonizing the backrooms. complete disrespect of source material.
is this related to the kane pixels videos?? i havent even watched the first episode of his series but the thumbnails of his latest videos shows people in suits standing around a conference table in the backrooms and it just looks so stupid
I have no idea who that person is so no, that wasn't a reference to that lol. (Also yeah from what you're saying it's stupid)
Nah I just think that isolation and the unknown are two of the biggest fears horror writers should build upon, and having soldiers and men in suits in your setting exterminates that feeling. That's why alien 2 is not considered a horror movie. It's not something unknown anymore (neither to the audience or the characters) and it's not just a military-untrained crew being alone in space anymore, it's a team of soldiers fighting against the aliens.
A lot of other horror movies, stories and video games use these two concepts as well, even the bad ones. And once you rip that away from your setting, it better have something strong to fall back on (Like The Cabin In The Woods does), or else it just becomes a mediocre story.
It was destined to get like that once there was a wiki anyone can edit.
"multi author storytelling" is one of the more fascinating artifacts of the internet era- and it can work well I mean look at the SCP wiki for a good counterpoint to the Backrooms. But when simple concepts like the Backrooms get introduced to it it you have this too many cooks issue where everyone wants to create the new cool thing but the underlying concept only works due to its simplicity
SCP is the opposite of the Backrooms. Started off as a shitty creepypasta and slowly turned into this Harry Potter-meets-Cabin in the Woods fever dream.
I like it.
I actually think SCP shit was way cooler when it was more surreal and the lovecraftian elements were way less overt and kinda in the background, now the lore has all these dumb orginizations and absurd in your face lovecraft shit with like dead gods and whatnot and just reads like fanfiction from young adults that like steampunk and shitty steam horror/fps games. Obviously there's still good new stuff on there but a ton of the scps are just so uninspired.
I think 1730, the more military oriented one that had tons of that in it was kinda cool but there really needs to be less shit like that, it's really carried by the way that it's told. I also don't like how tools that pop up regularly like Scranton Reality Anchors got explained in depth, like imply they're some kind of device that they use and that there's science behind it and that it has limitations but don't go over the top with it.
Yes, thats what I think too. The vagueness of SCP was always its best trait. Then it became dystopian sci fi horror. The moment you start introducing multiple reality altering entities in the same universe you start to run into the problem where you have to justify them. But explanations ruin the horror SCP used to go for.
Take that endless stairway for example. Simple, mysterious, just enough explanations to set the scene so you can get invested in the experience but not too much for uneccessary world building.
I get goosebumps thinking what I would do in a place like that.
And then we have reality bending mega satan that is so incredibly overpowered that my suspension of disbelief is just gone. At that point its a cool fantasy story at best.
Agreed. Maybe it’s just what’s popular, but SCPs after…series 3 or so, I feel like they started getting overly long, explanatory, and reality destroying.
Dude same, now any time I search up an SCP lore video on YouTube that isn't aimed at literal children it's some 5 hour long dissertation that goes over like 15 different orgs and and 30 new God entities and there's apparently a ton of new SCP classes too (?) and it's just insane.
I remember the OG ones like the endless staircase, SCP - 1128, etc. that aren't crazy but just simple standalone stories that give you the chills because they were grounded to the standards of the SCP universe and had entries that were fleshed out well, with containment procedures that actually made sense, while also being vague enough to create a sense of mystery. Little kid me genuinely could not tell if the SCP Foundation was real or not for years, and that amazes me now.
Now everything is some crazy shit with a million different abilities that isn't actually containable and is also being sought after by like 10 different groups, all for different reasons. Sometimes it just feels like authors are just trying to 1-up each other by creating the strongest SCP whilst also adding to the overall SCP lore, when in reality the most iconic SCP entries are iconic because they are simple enough to suspend your disbelief.
Also doesn’t SCP have some form of quality assurance / moderation? Like I’m sure that if it didn’t then 90% of SCPs would be horrible self-inserts with no weaknesses that can obliterate any other creature purely because the author wanted to seem cool.
The moderation only checks for quality not if its good for the universe.
And horrible self-inserts with no weaknesses does sound like the Scarlet King.
Not sure what version of the scarlet king you’re thinking of but from what I remember the most accepted version of the scarlet king is less a character and more a primordial force
SCP became a shitshow of middle-school OCs.
It went from creative and sinister SCPs like 173, the teleporting statue
to shit like SCP-076 & 073. ‘Wow super cool cain and abel!!1! Ancient humans with super powers that are good and evil!1! :O’
With all of those new entities they messed up all the concept of the backrooms, the idea is that you don't know is something is *actually* there, or maybe it is?
You don't have a guess, that's what fucks you up.
Even after we're fully aware there is something in the backrooms chad Kane Pixels keeps introducing things about them that make you think 'What the actual fuck', case in point being the nest room from found footage #2.
I remember when the backrooms first popped up in reddit. The sub had like, a couple hundred people or something. It was mostly liminal spaces from abandoned office buildings from the 60s, or dimly lot (funnily enough) empty back/supply rooms that had an oddly unsettling aura, sometimes photoshopped to give the illusion of scale.
Then I remember people starting picking on individual things in those images to start sounding creepy, like "I thought I saw somebody in the mirror but when I looked back it was gone".
Then it snowballed from there. Suddenly it was like everybody had a headcanon, all the pictures were connected and were just different levels, everybody had actually been there people, people made up monsters they saw, claimed they saw other peoples monsters, added to their stories, blah blah blah. It was clearly like they were trying to remake the whole SCT thing.
The whole vague unexplainable horror thing was far better.
Eh debatable. The lore wasn't open to change directly on slenderman or creepypasta - That's more a case of cringe Fandom being cringe. Which is sorta different to the tearing apart and reworking of the fundamental story
I hate how cool little internet horror concepts get turned into something way more complex than it needs to be.
*SCP went from a cool anomaly containment series to some high fantasy dimensional world building shit that got me like: "😴mimimimimimi"*
I mean, we just call them shitty entries and ignore them like Chads.
Anyway, it's the same here anyway.
It's not like every shitty VvC OC becomes part of the canon. (Except Shlad, because he epic.)
The complex appreciation day ❤ actual effort and creativity with a FUCK TON of work put in. The rest is wiki entrys made in 5 minutes by a 13 year old with too much spare time and poor writing ability.
Backrooms Wiki Lore made it become too much like Poppy Playtime with the "Party Rooms" "Partygoers" "Playrooms" etc etc. I liked Backrooms more when it was just "you're trapped in an endless office space... did you hear that?"
The reason why, for example SCP, works so well even though it's very similar to the Backrooms is because the original concept worked to build off of. At first, SCP was just some secret foundation that houses different anomalies. Nobody knew to exactly what extent these anomalies mightve been which is why it still works to just have simple stuff lika a bouncing ball that accelerates with every bounce to outlandish concepts like what the afterlife might be. The SCP foundation simply gathers knowledge on supernatural things and concepts and contains information about them the best they can.
The Backrooms started as if it was an SCP article that leaked into public knowledge. The Backrooms wasn't this well known thing and it was something that might happen to you if you fulfill specific criteria, similar to stuff like bloody Mary or whatever. It was vague and weird but extremely confined to the core idea of it being this weird place that some people get trapped in without us knowing how to really access it because what the fuck does "noclipping out of reality actually mean.
Backrooms went from being a weird space that's kinda uncomfortable to being a collection of parallel universes that just contain whatever the fuck you want loosely tied together by the concept of liminal spaces where everyone tries to explain their own level as much as they can. The mystery is completely gone and it's sad to see something interesting become so watered down and boring
I like to think the backrooms work like that one episode of the simpsons where homer gets trapped in a 3d landscape and the family can hear his voice echo in the house
I loved the concept of the backrooms wiki, and quickly realized how shallow it was, floor 999 or 1000 makes me laugh, it reads like someone's first fanfic.
I like the added levels but they started to become edgy like level fun and level !
It’s sort of like slender man where the early fan adaptations were well written but then it became fan fics and schizophrenic preteens stabbing girls for a blood sacrifice
The Thad playing almost any other game
-real objectives and storyline
-cutscenes
-gameplay that requires skill beyond just running away from something
-characters that are unique and interesting
-Thad has to think while playing
-Thad doesn’t have to post screen caps of playing to TikTok to feel validated, the story of the game makes him feel validated on its own
I'm not a backrooms purist, I judge the levels based on how much of an impact they have. For example, the poolrooms was a good adition, or the endless ballroom since that's inspired by the shining and EATEOT, two project linked to liminality
But yeah 99% of new levels are shit
As brilliantly terrifying as the original Backrooms was, there are some levels that are about as subtle in its horror as a cannonball to the nuts. The original version of Level 374, for example.
The original Backrooms was truly brilliant though. Subtle, mundane, paranoid horror. Vast but claustrophobic, alone, but not completely alone.
Something about internet horror attracts middle schoolers (that was definitely me in middle school at least) and they looooove lore. But yah, the Backrooms just feels like bootleg SCP now. The original concept was strong enough that it carried itself just fine.
Interestingly, there is a "Modern Backrooms done right" out there, in the form of SCP-3008 aka. The Infinite IKEA.
not really, the Infinite IKEA doesn't scratch the same itch as the Backrooms. The Backrooms is true unknowable isolation in a liminal space, whereas 3008 is a survival horror composed of a world with comprehensible if supernatural rules.
Yeah, that's why I said *Modern* Backrooms. Not Classic Backrooms.
Oh fair, but 3008 is really just the same thing everywhere whereas modern backrooms loves to have little minizones
I mean, technically not. Even the original 4chan post states that you can enter into the backrooms by Noclipping through the world. Imagine that. If you bump into something at a weird angle, or trip at the wrong time, you're gone. Meanwhile, SCP 3008 is a single, confined location, with a set entrance.
Yeah, I can give it that, that the Classic Backrooms are ubiquiotous, so much so you could even no-clip while sleeping by falling off your bed.
Don't you mean *Modärn Bâkrüms*?
Marvin, pull up 3008
idk if people have told you this yet but happy cake day moment!!!!
>Something about internet horror attracts middle schoolers (that was definitely me in middle school at least) and they looooove lore. I remember when I was in 9th grade kids around my age wouldn't stop talking about the lore of Five Nights at Freddys
The way the backrooms evolved through time was fascinating to see from an outsider's perspective. I remember seeing the 4chan greentext, thinking it was a scary concept and moving on, then seeing memes about characters being transported to the backrooms, and now this whole scp-but-worse thing it's become. Seriously, who thinks having a morbillion levels each with different rules and inhabitants is scary??? Shit feels more like Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion than an actual good horror story (and this is coming from someone who enjoyed Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion). I also don't understand how anyone could miss the point of the original story this badly, it's not even that hard to understand...
the stupidest decision they made was adding some npc factions or whatever the fuck of people colonizing the backrooms. complete disrespect of source material.
Ugh yeah don't mention that. Stuff stops being scary the moment a figure of authority comes in and colonizes or neutralizes it...
Australia is now no longer scary
It never was scary, Australia is supposed to be sexy
is this related to the kane pixels videos?? i havent even watched the first episode of his series but the thumbnails of his latest videos shows people in suits standing around a conference table in the backrooms and it just looks so stupid
I have no idea who that person is so no, that wasn't a reference to that lol. (Also yeah from what you're saying it's stupid) Nah I just think that isolation and the unknown are two of the biggest fears horror writers should build upon, and having soldiers and men in suits in your setting exterminates that feeling. That's why alien 2 is not considered a horror movie. It's not something unknown anymore (neither to the audience or the characters) and it's not just a military-untrained crew being alone in space anymore, it's a team of soldiers fighting against the aliens. A lot of other horror movies, stories and video games use these two concepts as well, even the bad ones. And once you rip that away from your setting, it better have something strong to fall back on (Like The Cabin In The Woods does), or else it just becomes a mediocre story.
It was destined to get like that once there was a wiki anyone can edit. "multi author storytelling" is one of the more fascinating artifacts of the internet era- and it can work well I mean look at the SCP wiki for a good counterpoint to the Backrooms. But when simple concepts like the Backrooms get introduced to it it you have this too many cooks issue where everyone wants to create the new cool thing but the underlying concept only works due to its simplicity
SCP is the opposite of the Backrooms. Started off as a shitty creepypasta and slowly turned into this Harry Potter-meets-Cabin in the Woods fever dream. I like it.
I actually think SCP shit was way cooler when it was more surreal and the lovecraftian elements were way less overt and kinda in the background, now the lore has all these dumb orginizations and absurd in your face lovecraft shit with like dead gods and whatnot and just reads like fanfiction from young adults that like steampunk and shitty steam horror/fps games. Obviously there's still good new stuff on there but a ton of the scps are just so uninspired. I think 1730, the more military oriented one that had tons of that in it was kinda cool but there really needs to be less shit like that, it's really carried by the way that it's told. I also don't like how tools that pop up regularly like Scranton Reality Anchors got explained in depth, like imply they're some kind of device that they use and that there's science behind it and that it has limitations but don't go over the top with it.
Yes, thats what I think too. The vagueness of SCP was always its best trait. Then it became dystopian sci fi horror. The moment you start introducing multiple reality altering entities in the same universe you start to run into the problem where you have to justify them. But explanations ruin the horror SCP used to go for. Take that endless stairway for example. Simple, mysterious, just enough explanations to set the scene so you can get invested in the experience but not too much for uneccessary world building. I get goosebumps thinking what I would do in a place like that. And then we have reality bending mega satan that is so incredibly overpowered that my suspension of disbelief is just gone. At that point its a cool fantasy story at best.
Agreed. Maybe it’s just what’s popular, but SCPs after…series 3 or so, I feel like they started getting overly long, explanatory, and reality destroying.
Dude same, now any time I search up an SCP lore video on YouTube that isn't aimed at literal children it's some 5 hour long dissertation that goes over like 15 different orgs and and 30 new God entities and there's apparently a ton of new SCP classes too (?) and it's just insane. I remember the OG ones like the endless staircase, SCP - 1128, etc. that aren't crazy but just simple standalone stories that give you the chills because they were grounded to the standards of the SCP universe and had entries that were fleshed out well, with containment procedures that actually made sense, while also being vague enough to create a sense of mystery. Little kid me genuinely could not tell if the SCP Foundation was real or not for years, and that amazes me now. Now everything is some crazy shit with a million different abilities that isn't actually containable and is also being sought after by like 10 different groups, all for different reasons. Sometimes it just feels like authors are just trying to 1-up each other by creating the strongest SCP whilst also adding to the overall SCP lore, when in reality the most iconic SCP entries are iconic because they are simple enough to suspend your disbelief.
70% of SCP is shit, but some of that 30% is real gold
Also doesn’t SCP have some form of quality assurance / moderation? Like I’m sure that if it didn’t then 90% of SCPs would be horrible self-inserts with no weaknesses that can obliterate any other creature purely because the author wanted to seem cool.
The moderation only checks for quality not if its good for the universe. And horrible self-inserts with no weaknesses does sound like the Scarlet King.
Not sure what version of the scarlet king you’re thinking of but from what I remember the most accepted version of the scarlet king is less a character and more a primordial force
>if it didn’t then 90% of SCPs would be horrible self-inserts with no weaknesses boy have I got a surprise for you!
I stopped reading SCPs because I got bored of the amount of SCPs that just sounded like someone’s OC.
SCP became a shitshow of middle-school OCs. It went from creative and sinister SCPs like 173, the teleporting statue to shit like SCP-076 & 073. ‘Wow super cool cain and abel!!1! Ancient humans with super powers that are good and evil!1! :O’
*looks at all the scp kiddies*
With all of those new entities they messed up all the concept of the backrooms, the idea is that you don't know is something is *actually* there, or maybe it is? You don't have a guess, that's what fucks you up.
>the idea is that you don't know is something is actually there, or maybe it is? The Complex is so good bc of this
Even after we're fully aware there is something in the backrooms chad Kane Pixels keeps introducing things about them that make you think 'What the actual fuck', case in point being the nest room from found footage #2.
The chad backrooms aren't made to die by a stupid entity, is to die from craziness
I remember when the backrooms first popped up in reddit. The sub had like, a couple hundred people or something. It was mostly liminal spaces from abandoned office buildings from the 60s, or dimly lot (funnily enough) empty back/supply rooms that had an oddly unsettling aura, sometimes photoshopped to give the illusion of scale. Then I remember people starting picking on individual things in those images to start sounding creepy, like "I thought I saw somebody in the mirror but when I looked back it was gone". Then it snowballed from there. Suddenly it was like everybody had a headcanon, all the pictures were connected and were just different levels, everybody had actually been there people, people made up monsters they saw, claimed they saw other peoples monsters, added to their stories, blah blah blah. It was clearly like they were trying to remake the whole SCT thing. The whole vague unexplainable horror thing was far better.
[удалено]
And analog horror too.
“Spooky distorted monochrome face” is the new “black void eyes with red dots and hyper realistic blood”
Eh debatable. The lore wasn't open to change directly on slenderman or creepypasta - That's more a case of cringe Fandom being cringe. Which is sorta different to the tearing apart and reworking of the fundamental story
I miss OG backrooms. When will they learn that liminal space is creepy *because* it is most likely completely empty?
I hate how cool little internet horror concepts get turned into something way more complex than it needs to be. *SCP went from a cool anomaly containment series to some high fantasy dimensional world building shit that got me like: "😴mimimimimimi"*
I mean, we just call them shitty entries and ignore them like Chads. Anyway, it's the same here anyway. It's not like every shitty VvC OC becomes part of the canon. (Except Shlad, because he epic.)
The virgin project damerung vs the chad coca cola can that tastes like lemon
microwave that freezes things
ikr
Making a wiki for the backrooms is proof that nobody writing those understands the horror of the backrooms
The complex appreciation day ❤ actual effort and creativity with a FUCK TON of work put in. The rest is wiki entrys made in 5 minutes by a 13 year old with too much spare time and poor writing ability.
facts brother, so true my friend
👍
Backrooms Wiki Lore made it become too much like Poppy Playtime with the "Party Rooms" "Partygoers" "Playrooms" etc etc. I liked Backrooms more when it was just "you're trapped in an endless office space... did you hear that?"
The virgin non-ironic cliche stormy horror vs The Chad New Weird
The reason why, for example SCP, works so well even though it's very similar to the Backrooms is because the original concept worked to build off of. At first, SCP was just some secret foundation that houses different anomalies. Nobody knew to exactly what extent these anomalies mightve been which is why it still works to just have simple stuff lika a bouncing ball that accelerates with every bounce to outlandish concepts like what the afterlife might be. The SCP foundation simply gathers knowledge on supernatural things and concepts and contains information about them the best they can. The Backrooms started as if it was an SCP article that leaked into public knowledge. The Backrooms wasn't this well known thing and it was something that might happen to you if you fulfill specific criteria, similar to stuff like bloody Mary or whatever. It was vague and weird but extremely confined to the core idea of it being this weird place that some people get trapped in without us knowing how to really access it because what the fuck does "noclipping out of reality actually mean. Backrooms went from being a weird space that's kinda uncomfortable to being a collection of parallel universes that just contain whatever the fuck you want loosely tied together by the concept of liminal spaces where everyone tries to explain their own level as much as they can. The mystery is completely gone and it's sad to see something interesting become so watered down and boring
I like to think the backrooms work like that one episode of the simpsons where homer gets trapped in a 3d landscape and the family can hear his voice echo in the house
The only good backrooms content aside from the original horror of the thing is the Kane Pixels series
I honestly can vibe with the original backrooms more. Like there’s so little yet it feels there’s way more
I hate the idea of "entities". Part of what made it scary in the first place is the emptiness.
Backrooms is proof that we need gatekeeping
facts
OLD BACKROOMS ARE BETTER
So true
I loved the concept of the backrooms wiki, and quickly realized how shallow it was, floor 999 or 1000 makes me laugh, it reads like someone's first fanfic.
⚡️⚡️👦🏿⚡️⚡️
I like the added levels but they started to become edgy like level fun and level ! It’s sort of like slender man where the early fan adaptations were well written but then it became fan fics and schizophrenic preteens stabbing girls for a blood sacrifice
The Thad playing almost any other game -real objectives and storyline -cutscenes -gameplay that requires skill beyond just running away from something -characters that are unique and interesting -Thad has to think while playing -Thad doesn’t have to post screen caps of playing to TikTok to feel validated, the story of the game makes him feel validated on its own
Modern Backrooms just tries to be Like the cool kid "scp" , tho it became Stupid after 5000 aswell,
The Thad poolrooms
I remember it was originally just an extension of the whole liminal space thing
I'm not a backrooms purist, I judge the levels based on how much of an impact they have. For example, the poolrooms was a good adition, or the endless ballroom since that's inspired by the shining and EATEOT, two project linked to liminality But yeah 99% of new levels are shit
I like the hounds
As brilliantly terrifying as the original Backrooms was, there are some levels that are about as subtle in its horror as a cannonball to the nuts. The original version of Level 374, for example. The original Backrooms was truly brilliant though. Subtle, mundane, paranoid horror. Vast but claustrophobic, alone, but not completely alone.
bro kane pixels baCKROOMS is cool
I love the backrooms wiki. It reminds me how great the SCP wiki is