Backrooms: Splatter

Backrooms: Splatter is a first-person co-op horror game about a night-shift crew sent by PIGMENT CO. to paint an endless office. You carry a paint sprayer and use paint to reveal hidden surfaces, signs and clues, but spraying is loud and draws attention. Play alone or with up to three friends online.

Paint through the office

Paint can reveal where an invisible floor lies, pass through a door that you can also walk through, and uncover signs that help you navigate looping rooms. The office’s puzzles include a colour lock with a code hidden in invisible ink, a shutter that opens only while three painted eyes are wet, and a breaker that needs a long spray while the patrol is elsewhere. Your shift-orders clipboard shows the next job, while hidden paint-ink messages point the way to whoever sprays them first.

Each puzzle gives you a choice between speed and noise or taking things slowly and quietly. Spraying and running carry through the office, and something always comes to investigate. You can hide in lockers or under desks, lure threats away, break line of sight or run a loop to escape. One side room has a gate that two players can hold open together, so playing alone requires speed.

The office and its threats

Office Zero is a large, looping level with a cubicle maze, a dark archive, locker rooms and a staff wing. Open-plan halls let you circle around when something is behind you, while a blackout and a brick house with a warm light in its window add to the route. Safe rooms offer a chance to breathe. Monsters arrive in waves, followed by quiet periods that do not always last.

Four entities hunt according to different rules:

• The Smiler: appears in dark places and stares, creeping closer when you look away. It eventually charges and disappears; paint its grin rather than staring back.
• The Listener: hunts by sound despite being blind. Standing still beside it keeps you safe; painting an old radio or spraying LOUD paint on a wall can draw it away.
• Night Staff: walks a long route through the locker rooms. Learn its circuit and timing, then work while the room is empty.
• The Clerk: roams the floor like an employee checking rooms. When it notices you, it hunts as you run, breathe hard or check lockers, then eventually leaves.

Shifts and equipment

PIGMENT CO. pays you by the shift. You can paint survey stakes, recover salvage from crews that did not return and find their VHS tapes. Your payslip prints when you get home, but dying means losing whatever you were carrying.

At the Crew Floor, you can visit a lounge with couches, a jukebox and an arcade machine, a supply counter where you spend your money, and a locker room displaying your crew’s hazmat suits. Almost everything in the base can be used, from the vending machine and microwave to the dartboard and fire extinguisher.

There are 10 upgrade branches: paint tank, nozzle, pressure, paint belt, backpack, vest, soft boots, flashlight, anomaly gauge and iron lungs. Upgrades appear on your paint rig. The Paint Lab has eight colours as well as special paints: GLOW lights dark areas, REVEAL finds hidden surfaces faster, STICKY slows monsters down, and LOUD goes pop and attracts blind creatures.

New-hire orientation

New hires take the Orientation Course, which includes target practice, an invisible bridge over a foam pit, hiding from a cardboard Clerk on a cable and a lost lunch. Passing earns your portrait on the crew wall a red CERTIFIED stamp.

Visual style

The game uses low-resolution PSX rendering and a worn VHS look, with humming lights, fog and yellow walls. Bright paint stands out as the one thing on screen you can trust.