Opinion: Backrooms — The Symbolism of Creepy Yellow Rooms and Flickering Lamps

It all starts with an image that seemingly has nothing interesting about it: yellow wallpaper, a damp carpet, office lamps overhead. The rooms stretch off somewhere further, around a corner, and there are the same walls again. No windows, no people, no obvious way out. Just a hum you want to mute, even though the silence would be even worse.

This is Backrooms. An internet horror concept about a place you might accidentally fall into out of our reality if you happen to "clip out of the textures" at the wrong moment. It sounds like an old story from a gaming forum, and that was half the power of the idea. As if reality were a poorly assembled map, and somewhere between the walls, technical spaces were left over that players were never meant to enter.

You're not invited there. No one's waiting for guests. You're just walking through a familiar place one day, you step wrong — and suddenly you're lying on a yellow carpet inside an endless office. At first, it seems like a door will turn up eventually. Then you start to wonder if a door was ever part of the plan at all.

That feeling is exactly what turned Backrooms into a massive internet phenomenon. Not the monsters, not the lore, not the endless lists of levels. Just the sheer idea that behind a familiar wall, there might be a space assembled from fragments of recognizable places, but stripped of people, meaning, and any real end.

VGTimes has already broken down the Backrooms phenomenon in detail in our guide, What Are the Backrooms? Levels, Entities, Games, and Movie Explained. This time, I want to talk about it from the angle of perception, emotion, delivery, and deeper meaning. Get comfortable — this is going to be a long conversation, and a bit winding in places.

The origins of this creepypasta are fairly humble. A photo of an empty yellow room appeared online, accompanied by text explaining that if you accidentally "step outside the bounds of reality," you end up in the Backrooms — an endless maze of rooms with a damp carpet, yellow walls, and the monotonous hum of lights.

The original idea had no need for a massive encyclopedia. It ran on a single image and one deeply unpleasant assumption. You haven't ended up in hell. You haven't landed on another planet. You haven't fallen into a magical world. You've simply gotten stuck on the flip side of an ordinary room that, for some reason, keeps going on forever.

Then the internet did what it always does. People started adding details. Backrooms levels appeared, entities, groups of survivors, rules for transitioning between levels, food, danger zones, safe zones, dozens of versions of how to get there and how to get out. Some people wrote lore in the SCP style: reports, organizations, classification systems. Others turned Backrooms into a survival game complete with inventory and maps.

What emerged wasn't a single universe, but a pile of parallel ones. People often talk about "Backrooms canon" as if it exists as a single document everyone's supposed to read. It doesn't. There's the original creepypasta, various "wikis," games, videos, fan stories, and a separate universe built by Kane Parsons. All of them use the same familiar image, but tell different stories with it.

That's worth remembering when someone confidently insists that a specific entity definitely lives on a specific level, or that leaving a level only works one particular way. Maybe that's true in their favorite version. In a different version, that level might not even exist.

If you strip away all the accumulated noise, Backrooms is horror about a space that's fundamentally wrong. A space that looks familiar but doesn't behave the way it should (also on topic: Best Horror Games of All Time — Top Scary Games on PC, PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch).

You see an office hallway and understand that desks should have stood here once, employees should have been walking around, printers should have been buzzing, someone should have been late for a meeting, someone should have been heating up food in a microwave. None of that is here. Only the shell remains. Like a set left standing after the people have gone and forgotten to take life itself with them.

Liminal spaces scare us on roughly the same principle. An empty school at night. A playground shrouded in fog. A pool with no one in it. A mall after closing. These places were built for movement, waiting, conversation, bustle. When they empty out, your brain senses something is wrong.

Backrooms cranks that feeling up to the absolute limit. There isn't just one empty hallway. Here, the hallway repeats itself over and over. You can't say how far you've already walked. You can't tell if you turned the same way as before. You can't distinguish a familiar room from its copy. And at some point, you stop being sure you're even still the same person.

In the good stories about the Backrooms, the space isn't just a backdrop. It behaves like a character. It forces you to choose a route, get confused, return to the same places. It plants familiar objects somewhere they shouldn't be. It can look indifferent, but that indifference presses down harder than outright aggression ever could.

When people go looking for "Backrooms levels," they almost always find Level 0 first. That's the original image itself: yellow rooms, an old carpet, monotonous walls, unpleasantly bright light, the hum of lamps. There are countless variations on how it's described, but the general image barely changes.

Level 0 matters, not because it's the hardest or the most dangerous, but because it's the face of the entire idea. It's scary here precisely because nothing happens. You can walk down a hallway, turn, pass through a few more rooms — and still run into absolutely nothing. The emptiness in Backrooms doesn't calm you down. It makes you wait.

A monster in a place like this only works as a rare seasoning. If it jumps out every two minutes, the yellow rooms turn into an arena. At that point, it doesn't matter whether you're in an office, a dungeon, or a spaceship. You run, you hide, you look for med kits. A standard game loop.

When the creature is only glimpsed briefly, from a distance, around a corner, at the end of a long hallway, everything gets worse. After that, you might not run into anyone for another ten minutes, but you won't be able to look calmly at dark doorways anymore. The nastiest work has already been done: now you're the one populating the empty rooms yourself (further reading: TOP-15 Psychological Horror Games Guaranteed to Break Your Mind).

A whole set of rules quickly grew up around Level 0. Some say people end up here after "noclipping" out of reality. Some describe rare exits. Some add entities. Some leave the level almost entirely empty. Personally, I lean toward that last version. The yellow maze has plenty of power on its own. It doesn't need dozens of named creatures with stat blocks.

After Level 0, in the more popular versions of the lore, comes Level 1. There's less office emptiness here and more of an industrial-zone feel: warehouses, concrete, dark spaces, crates, long passageways. If Level 0 feels like a forgotten office nightmare, the first level feels more like a place where someone used to work, but then abandoned it in a hurry.

This is a different kind of fear. In the yellow rooms, you can slowly dissolve into the monotony. In a dark warehouse, you feel like there's somewhere to hide, and someone to hide there too. A sense of anticipated movement kicks in. Things are lying in the wrong places. The light isn't enough. There might be nothing behind any given container, but you still don't want to check.

From here, the levels start branching off in every direction. Every author develops their own rules, their own locations, their own explanations. One level looks like an endless parking lot. Another like flooded pools. A third resembles a hotel, an apartment building, a store, a playground, a sewer, a forest, a hospital, or something so strange you don't even bother looking for a real-world equivalent anymore.

This is exactly where the concept starts both blossoming and sprawling out of control at the same time. On one hand, Backrooms has enormous creative range. You can fit someone else's house into the yellow corridors, multiplied couches, a gap in the floor, an empty pool, a staircase in a concrete shaft. All of it will feel alien if you get the silence, the lighting, and the scale right.

On the other hand, it's incredibly easy to turn the whole thing into a meaningless catalog. You open a page, and suddenly there are hundreds of levels, entities, sub-levels, factions, items, and rules staring back at you. The unsettling idea of accidentally falling into an impossible place starts to feel more like a tabletop RPG that a hundred different people have been writing in turns.

The most common newcomer mistake is picturing Backrooms levels as floors in some giant building. Level 0, then 1, then 2, all in order. As if you could just step into an elevator and ride down.

In most versions, it doesn't actually work that way. A level is more like a separate zone, a state of a space, or a fresh slice of reality with its own set of rules. The transition doesn't always look like a door into the next room. Sometimes it's tied to a specific place. Sometimes to an action. Sometimes the character just keeps walking, walking, walking — and suddenly realizes the carpet underfoot is different, the lights have vanished, the walls have turned to concrete, and there's no way back anymore.

For good horror, this actually works better than a rigid structure. If everything runs like a subway with clear navigation, the fear dies fast. Sure, you can get lost. But at least you know you're looking for a station and riding along a line. What scares you in Backrooms is that maps might be useless. The place itself isn't obligated to keep the shape you saw yesterday.

That's where the endless arguments come from about which levels "really" exist. The answer is boring but honest: it depends on the specific piece of media. One game has pools; another doesn't. One video's transitions happen through cracks in reality; another's happen through elevators, doors, or random falls. Some creators build the world as a massive interconnected system. Others leave you with just one endless room.

Level Fun and similar zones — where horror mixes with bright colors, balloons, party decorations, children's music, and forced cheerfulness — deserve a section of their own. Levels like this tend to stick in memory instantly. Too bright, too deliberate, too obvious: this is a party nobody asked for.

The image itself works well. An empty kids' zone, a party with no guests, plastic decorations, paper hats, cheerful signage you'd rather look away from. It's a valid flavor of liminal horror. A child's space without children is unsettling on its own. Especially when it looks like the party's been going for a very, very long time, and nobody can figure out how to end it.

The problem comes in when creators start over-explaining everything else around that image. An organization shows up, entities with behavior rules, detailed instructions, methods of rescue, an almost full-blown factional war. At some point, you're no longer looking at an empty room full of balloons. You're reading a quest log.

Backrooms has a strange quirk: the more an author explains about the local creatures, the stronger the urge to go back to the yellow walls, where absolutely nobody was talking. An empty pool and a dim hallway can be scarier than the most elaborately designed monster. Simply because they were never given a name.

Entities are the most contentious part of the Backrooms. For some, they're exactly what makes the universe interesting. For others, they nearly killed the original idea.

And it's easy to understand people on both sides. An empty room quickly triggers anxiety, but a monster gives you a story. You can run from it, hide from it, fight it, study its behavior. It creates a recognizable image. You can draw it, put it in a game, use it in a video. People like having concrete things to latch onto.

But entities have a downside. As soon as every strange place gets a mandatory enemy attached to it, Backrooms stops being about space and turns into a collection of monsters scattered across maps. At that point, the yellow walls, the pools, and the hallways only exist as arenas.

The most effective creatures in this universe rarely stand in full view of the camera; they don't explain themselves. You hear a sound. You see a silhouette. You find traces. The camera falls, and then someone lifts it back up too high. A scratch is left on the wall. Clothes lie on the floor that no one was ever meant to see. That's already enough.

A creature from the Backrooms works better when it stays part of the place. Not a standalone boss that wandered in from a different horror franchise, but an extension of the wrong geometry. It moves incorrectly. It shows up where it couldn't possibly be. It looks familiar, but only for the first two seconds. After that, your brain stops understanding what it's looking at.

A familiar internet war has grown up around Backrooms over the years: what counts as canon, and what counts as fanon. Some people only recognize the original creepypasta. Others go by one of the major "wikis." Others treat Kane Parsons's series as the primary canon. A fourth group doesn't care at all — they came in through Roblox or from playing with friends.

Fanon is whatever the community invented that isn't locked into whichever version of the story you've chosen. But in Backrooms, that line is especially slippery. There's no single author who showed up, stamped their approval, and said: here's the final list of levels, here's the complete roster of entities, here's the map to the exit. The original idea grew precisely because it could be built on by anyone.

The problem isn't fanon itself. It starts when fanon gets retold as scripture. Someone watches a video, then reads a "wiki," then works through a dozen game guides, then absorbs someone else's theory — and now they're convinced they understand the entire universe's structure. When, in reality, they only know one branch of it.

It's better to think of Backrooms as an urban legend. Every version has its own inconsistencies. In some places, the stories don't line up. In some, it's obvious someone just made extra stuff up. In some, an author outright discards the old rules and keeps only the yellow rooms with the hum. That's not a flaw. It's part of the phenomenon's nature.

The most alive version of Backrooms always leaves room for doubt. You found a recording, but you don't know if it's real. You saw a creature, but the camera was shaking. You heard about a new level, but three people already went there and none of them came back. You read a survival guide, and then realized it was written by someone just as lost as you.

Games about the Backrooms appeared almost immediately. The concept practically begs to be made interactive. You can already picture a first-person character walking through hallways, shining a flashlight, searching for a way out, listening for sounds behind the wall. You don't need a massive open world with a hundred mechanics. A well-built space and the feeling that the route keeps slipping away is enough.

That said, the genre comes with a trap built in. Building yellow walls and adding a monster isn't enough on its own. There are plenty of projects like that, and they quickly blur together into one indistinguishable mass. The player remembers the first fifteen minutes, then figures out the rules, finds the safe spots, learns the creature's behavior, and starts clearing the level like an ordinary map.

A good Backrooms game needs to strip away your certainty at least occasionally. Not necessarily through cheap jump scares. Let a hallway you've already walked through look slightly different. Let a door that used to be an exit turn into a wall. Let something appear in the distance that the player doesn't have time to fully make out. Let a sound make you stop, instead of immediately running toward the objective marker.

It's also important that the game doesn't forget about emptiness. Co-op, puzzles, items, and enemies are all fine. But if you need to be collecting, hiding, or unlocking something every single second, the most important thing disappears. Backrooms needs a moment when nothing attacks you. You're just walking. And that alone is already unsettling.

Escape the Backrooms is one of the most notable options for anyone who wants to work through the Backrooms levels together with friends. The game pulls familiar imagery from popular lore: yellow office spaces, warehouses, pools, dark zones, strange rooms, entities, and the constant need to find a way forward.

It works especially well in a group during the first few hours. One person is sure they remember the way. A second one goes off to "quickly check a room." A third hears a sound and starts talking in voice chat in a noticeably different tone. Then someone disappears around a corner, and the rest suddenly realize they don't even know where they are anymore.

Co-op slightly shifts the nature of the fear. When you're alone, Backrooms presses down through silence and the sense that no help is coming. When there are several of you, the fear kicks in during the moments the group falls apart. As long as everyone's walking together, you can even crack jokes. The moment one person lags behind or turns the wrong way, the usual chatter cuts off instantly (more on topic: Best Co-Op Horror Games — The Scariest Titles to Play with a Friend).

Escape the Backrooms leans toward the version of Backrooms where the levels and entities matter in their own right. It's a game for people who like exploring locations, memorizing rules, moving through different zones, and living through scary episodes with friends. It doesn't try to be purely a slow liminal nightmare. There's a lot of recognizable fan lore here, and fans of that approach will find plenty to hook into.

The Backrooms 1998 feels different. Here, personal fear takes priority — a first-person camera, a found recording, and the sense that you're alone with a place that's already noticed you. The title itself immediately evokes an old video format rather than a sprawling encyclopedia of levels.

Games like this have their own charm. They don't need to show you the entire Backrooms world. Sometimes one bad basement, a staircase, a cramped hallway, a buzzing lamp, and a sound somewhere nearby are enough. The fear rests on the fact that you don't fully understand what actually happened, or how far you've already gone.

The Backrooms 1998 is closer to how Backrooms lived in a lot of people's heads before the giant lists showed up. You're not an explorer armed with a full set of rules. You're a person who ended up in the wrong place and is now just trying not to die from panic too soon.

That kind of delivery can be rougher, dirtier, and sometimes simpler, but it correctly captures the core of the idea. Backrooms shouldn't have to constantly explain itself. The less you're told, the harder that moment hits when something appears in the dark that wasn't there a second ago.

There's already no shortage of Backrooms games, from small horror projects to co-op survival titles and Roblox variants. There's The Complex: Expedition, various projects with identical or nearly identical names, mods, maps, and endless attempts to build a personal version of the Backrooms on off-the-shelf engines.

A lot of them share the same problem: the creators rush to entertain the player far too quickly. They throw in a chase in the first few minutes. Then a second one. Then a new entity. Then a puzzle. Then another level with a flashy theme. The game is afraid the player will get bored in an empty hallway.

But boredom can actually be a weapon here, if it's used correctly. Not real boredom, where nothing happens and you want to close the game, but that anxious anticipation. When you've been walking for way too long, the lights hum the same way, room after room repeats, and you suddenly notice one wall is standing a little closer than it used to be.

The most memorable Backrooms games understand that distinction. They give the player time to actually feel lost. They don't throw a jump scare in your face every minute. They don't turn every location into a ride. Sometimes they just let you listen to the hum of the light.

There's a separate version by Kane Parsons that grew out of his web series. It often gets blended in with the general lore, even though it's a self-contained story with its own logic, ASYNC, research notes, gateways, and an attempt to explain the Backrooms through the work of people who climbed too far in.

Kane's version leans much harder into the "found footage" feel. The camera shakes, the image breaks up, the sound works against the viewer, and the people on screen don't know what to do. Here, the Backrooms doesn't need a clean map of levels. It's more like a reality gone wrong, one that ASYNC is trying to measure with equipment and reports.

The best part of this branch is that it never turns the researchers into all-knowing experts. Sure, they have equipment. Sure, they've opened gateways. Sure, they set up cameras, run experiments, and try to catch creatures. None of that makes things any calmer. They might understand a single detail, but the place itself always remains bigger than them.

Kane's version also shows that the Backrooms is capable of crookedly reproducing familiar places and objects. It's as if it remembers something and then plays it back from a memory that's already blurred beyond recognition. That fits the core image of Backrooms perfectly: a world that resembles ours, but was assembled by someone who only ever saw human spaces in old photographs.

The film is worth watching for anyone specifically drawn to Kane Parsons's version and ready for a slow-burning, occasionally confusing horror without constant jump scares. The movie continues his ideas: ASYNC studies an impossible space, people fall into warped copies of familiar places, and the Backrooms gradually reveals that it can reproduce more than just rooms and furniture.

There's plenty here: yellow hallways, humming lights, cameras, found recordings, and scenes where the dread builds from a single wrong detail. Clark spots a sliver of light in the wall of his basement, steps through it, and at first just wanders through the rooms, touching things, trying to figure out where he's ended up. Then he finds traces of ASYNC, a blue bag, copies of objects from his own advertising work, and realizes the place has already taken something from his life.

The film works best in the moments when the Backrooms doesn't explain anything at all. Piles of clothing under a descent, Bobby's T-shirt among a pile of unfamiliar belongings, Kat's voice behind glass that turns out to be a solid wall on the other side, a camera lifted too high by something. Moments like that beat any lecture on the world's nature hands down.

To sum up: if you're after standard horror with a clear structure, obvious rules, and quick answers, the film might wear you down. It wanders through hallways for a long time, dwells on Mary and Clark's trauma, and leaves questions unanswered. But for a Backrooms story, that's actually fitting.