Backrooms: Dimension 9

GAME BRIEF

What's the game?

The title card reads 'july 20, 1969. 20:17 UTC.', the minute Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and you arrive as an astronaut in the Backrooms: yellow pillars, rows of ceiling lights, a lunar module and an American flag standing in the Atrium, and a man in a suit with a television for a head, the Usher, who tells you to 'find the others'. You see it all through a camcorder with a 1996 date stamp. The scanner (Q) 'hears their hearts', an EMP (R) shows what's behind the walls, and the logbook (Tab) keeps what you find: 70 fragments, each one 'left by a door', plus Places, Hunters, Residents and your own notes. The menu's Survey counts what every explorer has found together; when we looked it was 151 of 151, 128 places, 13 hunters and 10 residents, among them The Swimmer, The Car Park, The Poolhall, The Conversation Pit, Classroom 9 and a hunter called The Car. Its maker, apek, says he put an AI inside the game and told it never to stop building, and overnight it added 50 rooms, 9 entities and 5 harmless characters. The game says it too: 'It never ends. It keeps building itself.'

BEFORE YOU PLAY

What to expect

Free, with no download and no sign-up: you get an explorer file (ours was Arrival 6407) and a code to carry it to another device. The title screen came up in a few seconds on our PC. Up to 200 explorers share a world; we landed in world 1 of 2 with about 200 others, and other astronauts walk past with their names over their heads. Voice chat works by distance: the screen tells you when someone's near, and your mic stays off until you press T. apek, a solo developer, released it on November 7, 2026. He says 35,000 people played in the first 36 hours, about 1,200 of them at once, and that a server for 2,000 players in one world is coming.

Controls: Keyboard and mouse: W A S D move, the mouse looks, Shift runs, C crouches, Q scanner, R EMP scan, M map, E use or pick up, F flashlight, T mic on or off, Tab logbook. Also U sound, V camcorder, B motion blur, L lens, H hide the HUD, N skip to the next anomaly.