Caltrops - The Backrooms





	[quote name="blackwater"]Apparently there have been 4 major updates since the last time I played it. There are apparently 23 levels now, although some of them are pretty short. The last time I beat the game, there were only like... 6 levels! The updates fix some of the things I complained about last time. For example, there is now an inventory system, and you can choose when to turn on your flashlight. The Habitable Zone is a lot longer now, and less luck-based. Overall the nature of the game is still the same. It's sort of an action puzzler, with emphasis on the action part. You run away from monsters; you don't fight them. It's still very linear. There is a hub area that lets you go back to previous levels, but it's not clear if there is really any reason to do that other than getting an achievement you missed or something like that. You can take items between different levels, but currently the only really useful things to bring along are healing items. And even this isn't that useful since if you die, you'll respawn with full health. I guess the healing items would have been more important if I were playing on one of the harder modes that punish you more heavily for dying. Speaking of difficulty levels, the single-player campaign only lets you play on NORMAL. If you want to play on one of the harder modes, you have to go multiplayer. I can respect this choice -- better to have one good difficulty mode than a bunch of shitty ones. The hardest difficulty mode seems ball-crushingly awful: if anyone in your party dies, everyone goes back to the absolute beginning of the game. Apparently some people are really into this game and regularly compete to be the first to win on this NIGHTMARE mode after a new update. One thing I would like to see is more non-linearity. I'm not asking for a full-on Metroid experience, but just give me a reason to go back to the older levels once I'm done with them. Like if I could pick up a specific item that would be helpful somewhere else, or whatever. If you want to know whether this will give you the best backrooms experience, the answer is mixed. It's definitely not going to give you the experience of being alone in a vast weird landscape. The levels are pretty small. However, it is definitely the best GAME experience of any of the things in this base. Fancy (the dev who makes this game) seems to be quite interested in the lore. Specifically the wiki canon. A lot of the lore is goofy, of course (see my other posts about that). But, as the Coen brothers would say, "at least it's an ethos." I do kind of enjoy seeing how Fancy fits some lore item into the game. Some of it he apparently rejected as being too stupid, like a small bird being the scariest entity in the Backrooms. Other things, like a level that just says "you are an idiot" over and over again, he did implement.[/quote]