playing through myhouse.pk3 reignited my love of liminal spaces/elegiac images type stuff, so probably not surprising i went down a rabbit hole, came up a related but different rabbit hole and ended up using the backrooms wikidot as my bedtime reading for the past few days
i don't want to be mean, i actually think it's so cool that the original backrooms concept has grown so organically into this shared mythological background for stories with wildly different themes and aesthetics and approaches to worldbuilding.
but also the juxtaposition can be soooooooo funny
like, in this concept of the backrooms you are about as likely to waste years of your life wandering a maze of deceptively inviting spaces that reveal their sheer indifference to your existence through utter refusal to break from their mind-melting monotony until you die an absurd death from starvation without seeing a single other human being, as you are to come across a small town of 50 people sustained by a fully functional shopping mall food court that just exists for some reason, who send scouting parties to trade with other factions and hunt monsters in the steam tunnels a couple floors up
i really like how level 0 makes a great effort to preserve the vibe of the original backrooms 4chan post, leaving the existence of monsters or physical exits as ambiguous as possible and explicitly denying the possibility of human habitation, but there are still people getting really mad in the comments being like "not true! there are skin stealers and smilers and dollfaces on this level. minimal entity count is false"