Pretty simple game but I still enjoyed it!

This is just The Backrooms but with very, very bad writing. I empathise if English is not your first language, but hey, nobody was forcing you to make a game where the story is delivered almost exclusively through lengthy notes. If you don't know the difference between "shuddering" and "shuttering", then I'm sorry, but maybe you're just not ready to write for an anglophone audience yet. Give it a few more years.

And before someone accuses me of nit-picking minor typos and grammatical errors: no, the writing is bad in general. The theme of urban decay is extremely ham-fisted and unsubtle. If you need a character in your story to look directly at the audience and say lines like "looks like a flashback to the 'Golden Age of America', crazy how we thought these ugly sprawling walls were innovative and great" or "when the fads fade and the construction dries up — these places start to fall", I'm sorry, but you are a bad writer. Find other ways to communicate your ideas besides literally telling us!

Gameplay is just typical Backrooms stuff. Walk around a big, empty maze and find notes. At the end, there's a chase sequence with a monster that is slightly faster than you, so you essentially have to perfectly navigate the featureless environment. Run into even single dead end, and it's over; there's no chance to outrun or juke it in any way. So, of course, to ensure maximum frustration, there is no checkpoint before the chase, and you have to restart the game from the very beginning every time you fail.

I guess the one nice thing I can say is that the game runs well, though that's hardly a compliment when all it has to render is a bunch of empty hallways. And the demonic voice reading the final note managed to really startle me. That's it. Everything else is an uninspired, generic mess.

(Bonus: If you fall into any of the pits, you don't die. You're just stuck at the bottom, so you have to manually restart the game yourself.)

This one's tough, as I feel like there's a lot of potential in this idea of a mall with an entire level abandoned and left to rot while a new floor is built on top of it as some desperate act of hubris on the part of its owner. The main issue for me is, it doesn't really feel like a space that used to be a mall, it's just The Backrooms, something which I've experienced countless times at this point, and beyond the legitimately interesting narrative framing, this doesn't seem to do anything new with the concept.

Admittedly, I didn't play to the end, as the long lead-up of wandering indistinct halls and reading notes before the monster even first appears didn't give me much motivation to try again once I died. Also, despite what the notes implied, the monster seemed completely undeterred when I returned to a lit area, ultimately causing my death. I think adding some sort of distinct set piece early on, even something as simple as a sign displaying the name of the mall left in disrepair, would have done a lot to add some sorely needed intrigue and helped set the stage for the rest of the experience.

That all being said, what glimpses of the monster I got, I really liked. It's appearance and the uncanniness of its animation certainly made it feel like something worth fleeing from!

I feel like this concept really has wings, exploring a structure built by someone trying to bury the past in order to reach their vision of the future, and given more time, I believe it could really be shaped into something special, but as it stands, I don't see the uniqueness of that concept fully reflected here.