never got a horror vibe out of the backrooms or liminal spaces tbh. I want to just walk around in there and chill the fuck out. Why everyone sticking monsters in there. I want to run into a stray cat that's really nice and keeps rubbing their head on my leg and purring. and it follows me around and meows sometimes.
The Backrooms is just the gentrified horror version of playing Minecraft and building endless rooms and corridors out of cobblestone and glass for the joy of having built a sprawling covered walkway metropolis where it's safe to travel in the middle of the night
When TF2 came out I became enamored with it, but my home internet was too terrible for Xbox Live to be functional, so I had to physically take my Xbox 360 to a relative's place, where I'd spend hours being bad at it. During the downtimes at home, I'd sometimes explore the maps by myself. No internet, no one with me, just poking around those spaces practicing, messing around, and taking in every little detail. Sometimes I did psych myself into being creeped out, like a 1/1000 jumpscare was waiting to happen, but a lot of the time it was just this well-realized place frozen in time, meant to be populated by others, but for now it was just me.
It's one of the reasons I loved this early TF2 machinima, made before SFM even existed as a public tool. It did a wonderful job of capturing those same vibes.
