(Like, sure, sometimes they get sulky about not being given what they feel is their due respect and you have to fight them with hammers in order to persuade them to sell you stuff, but honestly, I know craftspeople in real life who'd make their customers do that if they could get away with it.)
In spite of being the trope namer, the Backrooms did not originate the "person wanders into a liminal space underlying normal reality which resembles an empty yet inescapable version of some mundane environment, where there might or might not be a Creature What's Gonna Getcha" genre of horror. (1/2)
Heck, you even have to fight Hell Fuck Castle's steward, the terrible HorseDog – or, rather, TurtleCat – at one point. It's very conscious of the forms of the genre!
(2/2) The premise has existed for decades, though without a popular "standard formula", many prior examples have only some of its central features, so their classification can be arguable.
Which brings us to the topic of today's dumb argument: is Stephen King's "The Langoliers" (1990) a Backrooms?
It occurs to me that the setting of "Mina the Hollower" might best be described as an abortive soulslike milieu, in that you show up just when things are starting to get bad, and – in the standard ending – proceed to kill King Big Sad Guy just before he's able to successfully do the Flame Thing.
It's striking how much the quality of interactions on this site has improved ever since I instituted a strict policy of blocking on sight every time someone replies to one of my posts with a "crying laughing" emoji and nothing else.
Just saw a post cross my feed which in passing referred to different kinds of Oreos as varietals, implying that someone, like, selectively bred them to be that way. I want to live in that world. I want to see the Oreo breeding program.
Something I appreciate about "Mina the Hollower" is how it situates conventional tropes of soulslike worldbuilding in a milieu where everything hasn't (yet) gone to shit, so sometimes your next-door neighbour is just a 30-foot-tall grey skinned humanoid with an unconventional complement of limbs.
I don't object in principle to putting a scary monster in your Backrooms-type media, but I feel strongly that you've entirely missed the point of the genre if at any point you actually show us the monster.
