Video Games Tutorials and News - Film Theory: How To Survive The Backrooms
Hello internet, welcome to Film Theory, a show that's coming to you live from the back rooms. because I have no idea how to get out of here. Internet speed's good though, and the moist carpet water isn't the best I've ever had, but you know it'll do it. For all of you who are uninitiated, the monotone misery that is the back rooms began back in 2019, when this image was posted to a 4chan board dedicated to unsettling images.
It's just an ugly series of rooms, right? No big deal. Well, it came packaged with the following text quote: If you're not careful and you clip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the back rooms where there's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum buzz, and approximately 600 million randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure hurts you. This post immediately got under people's skins because it's that endless series of mild annoyances that make you feel squeaky and uncomfortable. Slightly wet socks, a faint electric buzz, harsh lighting, ugly wallpaper.
In short, it is mundane, a horrible monotony that slowly wears you down mentally and physically. That miserable setting inspired lots of online artists to write their own independent creepypastas, even creating a short article game where you explore the space, but here in 2022, the back rooms have suddenly exploded in popularity thanks to a new series by VFX artist Kane Pixels, who has taken the basic concept and started to build a full-on world around it, and you know what that means.
Kane's first backroom short film takes place in well, already we've hit a bit of a snag. The slate says July 4th, 1990, but the description of the article actually says September 23rd, 1996.
September 23, 1996
Anyway, this is probably just because it was the first article in the series. Things become much clearer as the world gets more and more developed. Things start off instantly when a cameraman, fittingly enough named Kane, tries to set up a wide shot and immediately falls through the ground. There is literally no clipping through reality, only to wind up in a dank and deserted world full of humming florescent lights, retro carpeting, endless corridors, and monsters that, at least at first glance, remind me of walking tripods.
Our cameraman wanders around trying to find an escape. Along the way, he finds some interesting landmarks hidden amongst the endless walls, but ultimately he's caught and presumably killed by the weird, fungi monster. It's short, it's simple, and it's effective. since the massive success of that first backroom article.
Kane has been busy expanding the world with other shorts like the third test, first contact, and missing persons, as well as making the accompanying collateral. Mov, and March 11th, 1990, archived archive. How it all went wrong remains to be seen, but what I want to focus on today isn't the where and the why but rather the how, how to survive.
How to survive
In the fourth article in the main series, we see that since accessing the back rooms in 1989, missing person reports have been skyrocketing. As more and more people fall out of reality, never to return so if that were you what would you do?
How do you navigate a seemingly endless maze with limited resources, long enough to potentially figure out this mysterious world? How do you avoid an unknown monster that roams the halls? What mistakes do we see Kane make in his exploration of the back rooms, and what could we do better? Pay attention, friends, because today I have the definitive list of six tactics that might just save your life the next time you slip out of reality into an ugly yellow nightmare in collateral, Mov.
We learned that in 1989. The tests by the async foundation caused a massive earthquake that took place in the Santa Cruz mountains. So is the facility in the mountains. Are you at the top of a mountain and need to go down; are you under the mountain and need to go up; are you on the upside down and you need to get on upside down?
It's unclear at best, all we know is that in one moment we were filming with friends, and in the next we're here. So once you land in the back rooms, the first thing that you need to do is take the advice of the US Forest Service, which suggests that when you get lost in the woods or a cave, you do not move at all unless you have a specific reason to take a step.
Basically, you sit down, you don't panic, you assess the situation and the tools that you have at your disposal, and you stay where you are. You ended up at this location for a reason. Maybe this is an entry point for other people, and someone else will know to clip in. Maybe people will wind up looking for you and, by moving, you will throw off their tracking.
In short, by panicking, if you are moving forward without a clear plan of attack, you are only succeeding. In getting yourself more and more lost, eventually though, you will need to move, and this was Kane's first mistake. He had no plan. He just wandered aimlessly and headed towards whatever looked interesting.
This meant that when he started getting chased by the back rooms' monsters, he had no idea of his surroundings and wound up meeting a dead end figuratively. Or I guess it would be literal anyway. Proper grammar aside, we're in a repetitive maze. We're looking for an exit, and we need a way to track our movements.
Maze solving algorithm
For that, we need to use a maze solving algorithm, an automated strategic way of solving the maze with no prior knowledge of it.
Wall follower technique
Our first strategy should be using the wall follower technique, also known as the right hand rule.
Right hand rule
This is one that I think a lot of people have heard of but maybe don't understand the actual mechanics of.
It's basically a tried and true maze escape method that involves running your right hand along a wall while you navigate the maze. You see, mazes, in their simplest terms, are just shapes that you're trapped inside, so you, as the maze solver, need to find the outermost wall and the hole that's presumably in it.
Simply connected
Many mazes are what's known as simply connected, i.e., all the walls are connected together to the maze's outer boundary. As such, if you were to unwind the maze, it basically amounts to one big circle with an entrance hole and an exit hole, so by keeping your hand locked to one wall and following it all the way through, you follow the outline of that circular path and you either find the exit or you survived.
Or you wind up looping back to where you first started. That's certainly not ideal, but it is helpful because it tells us that the maze isn't simply constructed, but rather it's what's known as a disjointed maze, one where the walls aren't always connected to the outer boundary.
