The Complex: Found Footage

When the backrooms creepypasta got famous on the internet, every indie game developer started creating games about it. The first few games were rushed and really boring, but these kinds of games have been getting more and more polished, even to the point where we have a title like The Complex: Found Footage, which is a wonderful game.

A Walking Simulator in All Of Its Shine

The Complex: Found Footage is a great example of a horror-based Walking Simulator. It’s just you, exploring a zone, and finding your way to go from Point A to Point B while living many different experiences.

Contrary as you might think, this isn’t a survival horror game, or a horror game at all, as there aren’t any enemies you have to face (or run away from) or there aren’t supplies that will help you survive against hordes of enemies. It’s just you and the vast immensity of the backrooms.

The Top-Tier Graphics

The most interesting thing about The Complex: Found Footage is its graphics; the game is designed towards making you feel like you are watching a VHS of someone who dropped into the backrooms. To do this, the developers put several filters on the image so it feels blurry, like if someone converted a VHS tape into a digital format. Also, even if the game has the now-classic 1920x1080 resolution, all of your area of vision is trapped into a 352x288 square, resembling the classic VHS tapes in small and squared TVs.

For sure, without all of those tricks implemented in the graphics, plus some extra details like small dust patches on the screen that resemble a dirty camera lens, this game creates a wonderful experience.

The Ambiance

The concept of the backrooms is pretty scary by itself, but this game exploits all the fundamentals of the classic psychological horror (like forcing you to explore in the dark, sounds from nowhere, and a lot of silence during the game) to set you in an atmosphere that doesn’t need to throw a screamer to your screen to make you feel afraid of what’s coming next.

The game doesn’t have screamers, and there will never be anything chasing you, which works like a charm for the concept of the backrooms, where everything is on the prowl, waiting for you to commit a mistake to attack and kill you.

Slow Gameplay

One of the things that flop on The Complex: Found Footage is the gameplay, which is very slow. The protagonist is a slow walker, and it can be stressful considering the spaces are giant and there’s a lot to discover in the game. It can seem like a good addition to the gameplay as it makes you feel like you are exploring a completely new place that you don’t know but, with time, it turns out to be annoying.

Also, the game doesn’t take any moment to explain the controls, so you discover you can run, crouch, or use a flashlight by bashing buttons on your keyboard.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Hyper-realistic graphics
• A catching and chilling experience
• It’s a short game you can play in a day

Cons

• The gameplay is tedious
• It only has a few backrooms to explore, and the main one is giant, so the space feels a bit wasted