Backrooms: Splatter

Backrooms: Splatter is a first-person co-op horror game about painting the wrong rooms at the wrong hour.

You are the night shift. PIGMENT CO. has sent your crew into an empty office that doesn't end, with a paint sprayer on your back and one safety notice on the wall: "Do not run from the entity. Running voids your warranty."

In here, paint is the only thing that tells the truth. It settles on floors you can't see, passes straight through doors that aren't there, and brings up signs nobody was meant to read. It is also the loudest thing you own.

PAINT SHOWS WHAT'S REALLY THERE

• A floor that isn't. A pit cuts the corridor in half. Spray the empty air above it: where the paint lands, there is a tile. Walk only on what you've painted.

• Five doors. One drinks the paint. Paint sticks to four of them. It passes straight through the fifth, and so can you.

• The red rooms. Pick the wrong doorway and you walk back into the same room. Your old paint is still on the walls. Paint above the doorways to find the sign.

• The colour lock.Four lamps over a shutter, and the code is written on the wall in ink you can't see. Paint the wall to read it, then paint the lamps in the right order. Get it wrong and the door starts over.

• Three eyes.A shutter with three painted eyes that only opens while all three are wet. Alone you have to be fast. With a crew, everyone takes an eye.

• The breaker.Wake it with a long, loud spray, but only while the patrol is somewhere else.

Lost? Your shift orders clipboard always says what the next job is, and hidden paint-ink messages on the walls point the way for whoever sprays them first.

SPRAYING IS LOUD

Every puzzle is a choice: fast and loud, or slow and quiet. Spraying and running carry through the office, and something always comes to check. Hide in lockers and under desks, lure things away, break line of sight, or run a loop and hope it's long enough.

FOUR THINGS WORK THE NIGHT SHIFT

None of them stand in a corner waiting for you. They arrive, hunt, and leave, and each one plays by its own rules.

• The Smiler shows up in dark places. It stares. It creeps closer when you look away, and the grin gets wider. Then it charges, and it's gone. Don't stare back. Paint its grin.

• The Listener is blind and hunts by sound. Stand still next to it and you're safe. Paint an old radio across the room, or spray LOUD paint on a wall, and watch it crawl away.

• Night Staff walks a long route through the locker rooms. Learn the round, count the seconds, and do your work while the room is empty.

• The Clerk roams the whole floor like a polite employee checking rooms. When it notices you, it hunts: running, breathing hard, checking the lockers. Then it leaves. Usually.

OFFICE ZERO

A big, looping office level: a cubicle maze, a dark archive, locker rooms with a staff wing, open-plan halls you can circle when something is behind you, a blackout, and a brick house standing in the middle of it all with a warm light in the window. Safe rooms let you breathe. Monsters come in waves, then it goes quiet, then it doesn't.

SOLO OR 1–4 PLAYER CO-OP

Play alone or with up to three friends online. The office works either way, and one side room has a gate that two people can hold open together. Alone, you'll have to be quick.

GET PAID. GET GEAR.

PIGMENT CO. pays by the shift. Paint survey stakes, carry out salvage from crews that didn't come back, and find their VHS tapes. Your payslip prints when you get home. Die, and you lose whatever you were carrying.

• The Crew Floor: a lounge with couches, a jukebox and an arcade machine, the supply counter where the money goes, and a locker room with your crew's hazmat suits on display. Almost everything on the base does something when you press E, from the vending machine and the microwave to the dartboard and the fire extinguisher. Most of it is useless. All of it is on purpose.

• 10 upgrade branches: paint tank, nozzle, pressure, paint belt, backpack, vest, soft boots, flashlight, anomaly gauge and iron lungs. Upgrades show up on your paint rig.

• The Paint Lab: 8 colours, plus special paints. GLOW lights the dark. REVEAL finds hidden surfaces faster. STICKY slows monsters down. LOUD goes pop, and blind things come running.

GET CERTIFIED

New hires run the Orientation Course: target practice, an invisible bridge over a foam pit, hiding from a cardboard Clerk on a cable, and your first lost lunch. Pass it and your portrait on the crew wall gets a big red CERTIFIED stamp. PIGMENT CO. is very proud of you.

CREW TAPE

Low-res PSX rendering and a worn VHS look: humming lights, fog, yellow walls, and bright paint as the one thing on screen you can trust.