Backroom Company takes your usual chaotic, backroom adventure and adds in a slice of corporate greed. With a great mix of puzzles, looping gameplay and randomly generated maps it has a lot to offer.
When approaching Backroom Company I was skeptical of it being a very similar experience to something along the lines of Lethal Company or Pilgrim but it sets itself apart with a coherent story mixed in with puzzle levels that you earn through gains from exploring the many backroom levels available.
The puzzle levels set throughout are fun, with the first one set in an unmistakable yellow office-like area with recognisable enemies — such as the party-goers, the bacteria and many more featuring in the first level alone. The puzzles are reasonably challenging but don’t leave you stuck for long, making for a decent gameplay flow.
Once you’ve progressed through each level it’s time to earn some sweet cash to keep your corporate sponsors happy. You have five attempts, in your time in the backrooms, to meet a reasonable quota otherwise your expedition loses funding and you are left to wander the backrooms alone, forever.
There are a number of items and vending machines at your disposal to help make your time with Backroom Company just a little bit easier. Guns, paint, healing items, fortune cookies that give extra lives and much, much more are all available to you, but be sure to keep an eye on that money stack as you’ll need to amass quite the nest egg to reach the next level of your journey.
There are also a number of collectables and upgrades you can find spread around your map, anything from flaming shoes to robot legs that can add special effects to your runs — that both help and hinder you — to tailor the experience to benefit your team. My favourite had to be the duck shoes which replaced everyone’s footsteps with incredibly irritating duck sounds adding some light humour to a dark world.
When you are exploring your way around the collection levels you’ll notice that you are heavier when you carry more items so finding a good balance between speed and loot is going to keep you alive that little bit longer. You can use the shopping carts that are dotted around the starting areas but they can also be cumbersome and losing them can spell the end for your group as your treasures are left abandoned in one of the many similar looking rooms.
There are a surprising number of enemies in the Backroom Company with it sitting somewhere around twenty to thirty spread across a number of different levels. Each of these have their own quirks and mannerisms, leading you to take every new area slowly to make sure you learn and adapt to the new horrors waiting for you just around the corner.
Although there is a good variety of enemies they do sometimes repeat, with the Car Park level being a personal hell for myself and my group as three hook-wielding maniacs would constantly harass us when our pockets were full, leading us to be dragged into the depths and never seen again.
I can recall an occasion where our group had split up and I was walking through the pool area with a friend. He had a trolley and was talking to me as we wandered into the watery pool room. I started talking and the next thing I know he just didn’t respond. I turned around to see a cart and nothing else, it turned out there were holes in the pools leading to death pits and he was sucked into one without me looking, leaving me bewildered and concerned.
These experiences all seemed to happen quite often with lots of members of our group succumbing to the many traps and monsters dotted throughout the backrooms making it a thrilling experience, and with us genuinely being fearful of what was to come next.
If you are, however, brutally murdered in the pursuit of riches, the Backroom Company has you covered. Your friends will appear as semi-transparent ghosts to watch you fall for the same traps in the same way or attempt to help/hinder you in whichever way they see fit — all without talking to you. If they can manage to help you locate their company ID then you can even bring them back to the same level, which is a really nice feature.
Backroom Company was a great experience and for its price an amazing experience especially if you’re looking for a fun game to play with your friends.
You can find Backroom Company on Steam.
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