VanossGaming Plays Backrooms Escape Together

Brian Hanby — Terroriser to the internet — is lost. Not dramatically lost. Bureaucratically lost. He's in the right game, the right level, theoretically near the right exit, and somehow still completely separated from four other people in a maze that should not be this confusing. The rest of the group has already found the door, gone through it, and looped back to retrieve him. He was not retrieved. Then he died. From sanity loss. Alone.

"AM I DOING MY OWN VIDEO?" he yells into the void. "Are you kidding me?"

That's Backrooms Escape Together in a sentence.

Evan Fong (VanossGaming) uploaded a full session of the game this week alongside Terroriser (Brian Hanby), Daithi De Nogla, H2O Delirious, and Lui Calibre — the classic crew, running through the game's horror-supermarket levels with the energy of five people who have collectively forgotten how to read a map. The video is funny. It's also, accidentally, a decent stress test of what this game actually asks from its players.

The setup, fast: Backrooms Escape Together is a co-op survival horror game built on the Backrooms mythos — infinite liminal spaces, hostile entities, no obvious exits. The Backrooms started as a creepypasta traced to a May 2019 post on 4chan, but it didn't hit mainstream consciousness until Kane Pixels' found-footage YouTube series took off in 2022. The game leans into both eras: classic yellow-wallpaper liminal dread alongside newer Backrooms lore. The session in this video throws the group into a horror-supermarket level where the objective is less "survive" and more "run a functional grocery operation before the lights go out and everything tries to eat you."

You have a quota. You have five minutes per day-cycle. You have coupons that may or may not multiply your sell price — the group spends a genuinely chaotic few minutes figuring out that applying a new coupon to the machine appears to replace whatever was already in there rather than stacking on top, though based on the in-game confusion alone it's hard to say for certain whether that's consistent behavior or just bad timing. What they do figure out: the cheese wheel is worth selling. The milk is not. The hard hat sells for $4.99 in a collapsing economy. Frozen cauliflower: $23.

The Supermarket Sweep comparisons write themselves. "Oh my god, there used to be a game show years ago called Supermarket Sweep," one of them says, right before someone finds an orange and announces it like a treasure discovery.

Here's the thing about this game that Vanoss's video makes visible without quite saying out loud: Backrooms Escape Together is actually harder to coordinate than it looks. Not mechanically hard — the individual actions (pick up item, sell item, manage sanity, run from entity) are simple enough. The difficulty is informational. Everyone's navigating the same space but seeing slightly different versions of it, dealing with different threat timers, and carrying different resources. When someone asks "where are you?" the answer is almost always somewhere unhelpfully relative. "I'm over here, dude." Cool. Over here where.

If you've played Among Us or anything in that genre, you know what tight co-op information design looks like: everyone has the same map, tasks are visible, the game keeps you oriented. Backrooms Escape Together is not that. It's closer to something like Lethal Company in feel — the chaos is the point, and the game kind of assumes you'll fail to communicate and find that funny. Whether you enjoy it probably depends on whether you find "we have no idea where anyone is" inherently funny or inherently annoying. Vanoss's crew lands firmly in the first camp, which is why this works as a video. A group that actually needed to win might have a worse time.

The sanity system is worth flagging specifically. Your sanity drains when you're in the dark or near entities, and you restore it by eating food items scattered around the level. "I need all the water, my sanity is going crazy," someone says at one point. It's a resource management layer on top of the navigation layer on top of the time pressure — and during the supermarket section, the food you'd use to stabilize your sanity is also potentially sellable inventory. You're making micro-decisions constantly about whether to eat the apple or sell it. That's genuinely interesting design, even when — especially when — the group completely ignores it in favor of chasing a cheese wheel.

The coupon mechanic is where the session gets most interesting competitively. The group figures out that coupons applied to the checkout machine function as a sell multiplier, and there's a brief moment where it looks like they might optimize their way to the quota. "Imagine we had 1.4. Ooh. 1.5." The numbers are climbing. The time is ticking. Brian Hanby is somewhere being chased. And then: "Look at that. We did it." The cheese wheel closed it out. They never needed day three.

The mobile-first crowd reading this: here's my honest read. If you like Lethal Company or Phasmophobia-style co-op chaos on PC, Backrooms Escape Together is scratching the same itch in a more theme-park-y package. If you're coming from mobile co-op — Among Us, Stumble Guys, even the social deduction stuff — the vibe is familiar but the mechanical overhead is higher and the game leans harder on "funny chaos" than on structured competition. There's no real equivalent on mobile right now that pairs survival horror atmosphere with grocery quota management, which is either a gap in the market or a sign that the concept is very specifically a PC-couch-game thing.

The group wraps the main content and rolls into what sounds like a post-game bonus section — found footage sequences, the original yellow-room aesthetic, entities that are apparently just vibes at that point. "All right, everybody split off and go in separate directions and never see each other again. Goodbye." That's either a joke or a surprisingly accurate description of how every session of this game eventually ends.

The question for anyone deciding whether to play: do you have four friends who will genuinely laugh when the plan falls apart, or do you have four friends who will get frustrated? Backrooms Escape Together seems to be designed for the first group. It doesn't give you enough tools to avoid the chaos — it gives you just enough to feel like you almost could have. That's a specific kind of game design, and it's not for everyone.

Terroriser spent most of this session asking where everyone was. He'd probably do it again.

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— Jordan Mercer, Mobile Gaming Reporter, BuzzRAG