Four new Backrooms games landed on Steam in the week ending May 30, timed almost perfectly to coincide with A24's theatrical release of its Backrooms film adaptation. That brings the total Steam search results for "Backrooms" to over 500 entries, and that number keeps climbing.
Steam's Backrooms Games 2026
Search "Backrooms" on Steam right now and you'll get more than 500 results. Sort by user reviews to filter out the vaporware, and there are still 225 entries with enough players to have left feedback. Strip out the false positives and you're looking at at least 150 actual, playable Backrooms games sitting on the storefront.
That number doesn't even touch the Roblox Backrooms games, the itch.io entries, or the smartphone ports. Steam alone is its own problem.
Here's the thing: one publisher has 12 Backrooms games on Steam with 5 more listed as coming soon. The most popular of that publisher's releases, Backrooms: What's Next, has an all-time concurrent player peak of 9. Nine people. At once. That's the ceiling.
What 500 games actually looks like
The Backrooms premise, for the uninitiated, is simple: you clip through reality and end up in an infinite maze of yellow-carpeted office hallways, fluorescent lighting, and the faint smell of moist carpet. The horror comes from the emptiness and the sense that something might be following you.
What most players miss is just how liberally developers have stretched that premise. The Steam catalog includes:
- Backrooms Cats and Lava - a 2D puzzle game starring a cat where the floor is lava
- Backroom Warfare II - a military shooter set in the Backrooms (Backroom Warfare I does not exist)
- Chained in the Backrooms - four-player co-op where you and your friends are chained-together teddy bears
- Backrooms Santa - an evil Santa Claus stalks the hallways
- Skibidi Gyatrooms - the Backrooms with internet brainrot aesthetics and first-person cigarette smoking
The key here is that most of these are extremely low-effort, and they're designed to look similar enough to the legitimate entries that casual players can easily spend money on something that delivers almost nothing.
The ones actually worth your time
Escape the Backrooms sits among the most-played entries in the genre. It's a first-person co-op horror game focused on navigating and escaping the maze, and it extends beyond the classic yellow office setting into other liminal space environments like endless suburbia and empty swimming pools. If you want to play something with friends, this is the starting point.
Inside the Backrooms takes a more puzzle-focused approach to the same co-op formula, though it does use AI-generated art for some of its in-game paintings, which is worth knowing before you buy.
For solo players, The Complex: Expedition is the standout. It plays loosely with established Backrooms lore but nails the atmosphere well enough that fans of the A24 film will find it familiar and genuinely unsettling. Within the Backrooms is also worth a look if the PS1-era visual aesthetic appeals to you, applying that deliberately degraded look to the setting in a way that actually enhances the dread.
Steam's curation problem, illustrated in yellow
Steam's open platform philosophy is generally a feature, not a bug. The storefront's willingness to host weird, niche, and experimental games is a genuine strength, and the chaos is part of what makes browsing it interesting. Backrooms games are a stress test of that philosophy.
Finding a worthwhile Backrooms game right now requires more effort than it should. Publisher Secret Mode is currently running a Backrooms-themed Steam curator event called Backrooms Banquet, which filters out most of the low-effort entries and surfaces the games that actually have something to offer. That's a reasonable starting point if you want a curated shortlist rather than scrolling through 500 results yourself.
At minimum, Backrooms games tend to be slightly higher-effort than the Italian Brainrot-themed games that have been flooding Steam in parallel. That's a low bar, but it's a bar.
This week's Steam top sellers (May 19-26)
The top sellers chart for the week ending May 26 is worth a quick look. Note that 007 First Light and Mina the Hollower launched late in the week, so neither fully factors into these numbers despite the former being available for pre-order.
Paralives at number 5 is the chart's most interesting story. The life sim has been in early access and is already pulling strong numbers, suggesting the appetite for a genuine The Sims 4 alternative remains very real. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 appearing at number 9 is largely down to a 70% discount combined with a new update, so that one has context.
For deeper dives into what's worth playing on Steam this week and beyond, check out our game reviews and gaming guides for the full picture on the titles that actually deserve your attention.
