Pico Backrooms
These hallways seem to extend forever -- branching endlessly and impossibly. I think I see glinting teeth when I stray too far away from the elevator and into the dark, and then ... well I always end up back here. But I think there might be something in these journal pages -- if I can just find them.
Features:
Explore 5 unique, infinite, procedurally generated levels, including: Level 0, the Poolrooms, Level Fun, and an endless office.
Collect journal pages to reveal the story
Smilers inhabit the dark corners of the world
Instructions
Exploring the Floors:
Pick up pages by walking up to them and hitting "z". They can be well hidden in the maze.
The elevator is behind you when you start
Face the elevator controls and click "z" to bring up the elevator keypad
It gets darker the further you stray from the center. If you go far enough, you may see things. Or...more importantly they may see you.
Elevator Keypad: (use mouse or gamepad)
Select floor buttons to change floors. Not every floor can be access.
Click the exit icon to leavel the elevator and explore the current floor.
Click the journal icon to read the collected pages.
Journal:
As more pages are collected, more of the story is revealed. Maybe there is even a way out.
Click the Keypad icon to return to the Elevator Keypad.
Credits:
Music is "Cursed Storytime" by Fettuccini. https://fettuccini.itch.io/storytime
Technical:
File Package:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/files/10844/pico_backrooms_file_package.zip
This is a zip of all of the levels / multi-cart to enable offline/SBC play or viewing source code.
Very nice technical feat and the slivers of story are quite engaging. Well done!
Finding this on Splore at midnight was a truly special experience. Well done!
I'll be honest: I don't like/understand the "game" aspect
but the technique is mesmerizing 😍
- solid fps
- non grid aligned walls
- stairs
- circular pools 😍
- polygon objects
- scaling sprites
your work is rare but never disapoints!
i am impressed by the single fact this manage to be slighlty creepy in pico 8, this is an acomplishment in itself
Beyond the technical feat that this is, this does an excellent job at making the player feel lost and confused. After finding some pages and taking forever to get back to the elevator, I was genuinely scared when I turned around to see a floating face, prompting me to spam the button to close the elevator. Good spook indeed.
this is very impressive and i love the designs of some of the levels theyre quite spooky
Hi Sealec, No, it's not raycasting like Wolfenstein -- it's a bit closer to Duke-Nukem 3D. Generally raycasters work with data on a grid -- e.g. block is a wall or it's not a wall. This engine (you could call it 2.5d) allows walls to be angled and have visibility controlled by portals.
Haven't been expecting Episode 0 to evolve into something like this. Awesome!
Impressive! Definitely everything I would be wanting out of an immersive & low-poly experience :)
Side note (might not be in your respective wheelhouse); but the interface seems to breakdown right at level selection, upon selecting in the android-based Pikpik app. Here's hoping they get a fix through that facilitates playing the levels. Plays wonderfully herein~
It’s a multi-cart game that uses cart data to keep track of things like current level and number of pages collected— I wonder if Pikpik doesn’t fully handle that. (Also, I’ve surely done horribly sketchy things with my code that might only work with the official and desktop app…)
This is a cool and creepy game. I've always been fascinated with The Backrooms, and the video by Kane Pixels was awesome. The PICO-8 graphics even add to the surrealness and make it feel more liminal, almost like I'm playing an old computer game lost to time!
Any chance at all you could upload all of the carts? I play pico8 on an r36s, and it has no wifi with which I can access splore. If not, I understand.
This is mind blowing.
(I could tell just from the screenshot it was an electricgryphon game :)
Hi medocrityreel,
Sure thing -- I added a link to a zip file in the description, which contains all of the PNG for the levels levels together. This should work for offline play -- let me know it it helps.
I wish I could play this as an actual first person game, with mouse and left directional keys (that strafe and don't turn). That menu gave me that impression, but I haven't went deep yet as I read the description
Other than that I like this
Wanted to report back that the multi-cart zip works great on my handheld. Thanks so much for taking the time! Great game, btw.
Yay Milker!
I didn’t think anyone would have the patience to collect the pages, let alone read the cheesy story to get the code. (Or read the code to get to the code… either path counts in my opinion.)
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