My friends and I played this multiplayer horror game, Into the Backrooms. It was fine, lots of fun despite not a lot of polish.
Except, wow, I didn’t realize there was so much lore to the Backrooms. Did you know that victims of Cursed Souls could get sent to Level -250, “Pylon Purlieus,” one of the deadliest negative levels of the Backrooms?
For me, approaching your horror property this way makes it the opposite of scary. Some fans created r/TrueBackrooms, a splinter cell of the original forum for posting pictures with the original Backrooms’ eerie simplicity. One of the posts made me chuckle, poking at a greentext that read:
So what if someone “noclipped” in the year 1800 or 40 BC or the year 2200? Would they still go to an early 21st century room? At least make your creepypasta reasonable.
I don’t think fear is exactly the unknown. Lots of properties eke (eek) horror out of clearly defined rules. The Quiet Place. It Follows. The Ring. In properties like these, fear is a matter of timing. You know exactly what’s going to happen and when that thing is going to happen. Inevitability is just as scary as not knowing.
Less information, more information, neither determines whether something is scary. No more than knowing a color’s hexcode will tell you what color it is. The term Michelle Chang uses for this is “data resistance,” and it’s a concept I’ve gotten a lot of use out of and definitely will explore more.
“Scary” describes a feeling, not any kind of narrative flourish. At least for my taste, though, a two-headed robot that wants to stabilize timelines doesn’t have quite the same mystery as damp wallpaper and stale air.