THE BACKROOMS

you noclipped out of reality

Play now: backrooms.4oli.com — a first-person survival-horror game that runs in the browser with no account or download.

What is here

The game is a client-side Three.js/WebGL application written in TypeScript. A seeded, chunk-streamed world provides six levels — LEVEL 0, LEVEL 1, LEVEL 37, LEVEL 7, LEVEL 2, and LEVEL ! — each with its own way down. The final level replaces the descent with an escape portal and fuse objective.

The systems that define a run are:

• thirst, oxygen, health, torch charge, water, scavenged items, inventory, and melee/ranged combat;
• stalking entities with distinct behaviours;
• deterministic generation from ?seed=..., with checkpoints and records in localStorage;
• desktop mouse/keyboard controls, and an on-screen rig for touch devices that labels every button with what it does to the thing in your hand and hides the ones you have nothing to use. Use ?touch=1 or ?touch=0 to force touch mode on or off.

The four screens you are not playing on — the landing page, the pause, the death and the escape — are one design in src/menus.css, and it is a place rather than a menu. The landing is a room drawn in elevation: damp mono-yellow wall under a fluorescent tube, skirting, carpet, and two doors standing on it that are the only buttons on the page. Everything a reader or a crawler needs is on the paperwork taped to the wall further down, past the light. The pause holds the frame the game stopped on instead of covering it, death puts the tube out, and the escape screen throws the whole palette away for daylight — the one screen in the game that is not yellow. A grain-and-scanline layer with a running timecode sits over all four, so they read as footage of the same descent.

World geometry and textures are generated in code. Audio combines WebAudio synthesis with recorded ambience, footsteps, impacts, and other clips; see the audio credits. The interface uses one self-hosted web font; see the font credits.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev          # Vite development server at http://localhost:5173
pnpm check        # TypeScript check — game, Worker and tests
pnpm test         # unit and Worker tests
pnpm test:e2e     # build, serve and drive the game in a headless browser
pnpm build        # TypeScript check plus static Vite build in dist/
pnpm preview      # build, then serve the Workers asset locally
pnpm deploy       # build and deploy with Wrangler

The development environment enables VITE_HACKS=dev, which exposes the window.__game handle and shortcuts used by the headless checks. Production builds omit those hacks.

Tests

Two layers, and they answer different questions.

pnpm test runs Vitest over the parts of the game that can be reasoned about without a GPU: the seeded generators, the save file, the records, the item catalog and the inventory grid, the survival stats, the level table, combat, the fuse and descent layouts, the timecode, the control labels, and the telemetry client. Worker handler tests run in Cloudflare's workerd runtime. The suite also holds index.html against every getElementById in the codebase, and the Worker's accepted events against the ones the game can send — two contracts nothing else in the build can see across.

pnpm test:e2e builds the game with the dev hacks on, serves dist/client and drives the result through Puppeteer: it starts a run, walks, opens the bag, visits all six floors and their ways down, saves and resumes a checkpoint, escapes through the portal, and plays the whole thing again on a phone-sized touchscreen. Each check prints a pass/fail line and sets an exit code.

pnpm test:e2e                      # everything, from a fresh build
pnpm test:e2e --only smoke,save    # just those
pnpm test:e2e --no-build           # reuse dist/ as it stands

Set SHOT_DIR to collect the screenshots somewhere other than /tmp. Against a server you started yourself, each script also takes a URL:

pnpm dev --port 5199
node scripts/smoke.mjs 'http://localhost:5199/?seed=1234'

scripts/inspect.mjs is a probe rather than a gate: it sits through the encounter director's 45-second grace period, so it is run by hand after touching the spawner or the water.

CI runs the type checks, the unit tests, a production build and the headless checks on every push and pull request. The repository's pnpm build path, which pnpm deploy also uses, rejects a client bundle containing the window.__game handle or the floor-skipping shortcuts.

Anonymous gameplay analytics

The game sends minimal anonymous telemetry about gameplay events, with no IP, identifier, seed, or save data. Disable it with ?telemetry=off (?telemetry=on re-enables it); see the detailed analytics notes.

Controls

Input	Action
WASD + mouse	Move and look
Arrow keys	Turn and tilt, for touchpads and anyone without a mouse
Shift	Sprint
Space / C	Jump or swim up / crouch or swim down
E	Interact, pick up, or use the current objective
LMB / RMB	Attack / block, aim, or drink depending on the item
Tab / I	Inventory
F / R / G	Torch / receiver / drop
Esc	Pause and save a checkpoint

Look speed lives on the pause screen and is remembered between runs. A touchpad has far less travel than a mousepad, so it usually wants two or three times the mouse default.