The Backrooms are terrifying!
This was a really fun experience, I had some trouble finding way around the environment but once I got my bearings it was amazing!
The entity was SO SCARY until I realised he's harmless and just wants a dance party!
I REALLY want to try this with some friends, so if I can, I'll try multiplayer out!
My only issue was I couldn't find the last tape! Great game overall!
Play game
Lost and Found's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #2 | 3.740 | 3.740 |
| Use of Theme - Was the theme incorporated well? | #2 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Sound Design - Was that bump in the night the perfect SFX? | #2 | 4.300 | 4.300 |
| Halloween Spirit - Some aspect fear, the supernatural or the macabre? | #6 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Enjoyment - How fun is the game overall? | #7 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Aesthetics - Does the game look great? | #10 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Really good game! Couldn't find the final tape! The enemy was really scary until I realised he was just twerking on me. Great game!
Comments
I am not an experienced gamer and I was happy to see the game doesn't complicate the controls and the objective is straightforward.
Two notes:
1. The walkman was hard to open at first, but got the hang of it after the second attempt. Maybe a feature can be added where it automatically pops open when you grab a tape?
2. Also, I'm hard of hearing and I would love if you could add subtitles to the experience. Consider adding that as an option for deaf/hoh folks.
I had an idea of what to expect but it still gave me a mini heart attack after finding the 3rd tape. Overall, I really enjoyed the scare and adrenaline from just playing for a few minutes. AMAZING JOB everyone! From the eerie spooky feel to the easy to use controls 👏🏽.
Also bonus! This is gonna be so much fun to play in a group.
Liminal spaces and things that remind me of "House of Leaves" properly creeps me out. This game was able to let my imagination do all the work freaking me out.
What I Liked:
- The voice acting was top notch. Incredibly believable and it just added to the suspense.
- Music/SFX were also on point. Just continuing to add to the atmosphere.
- That stupid mannequin twerking. If it actually screamed or got in my face, I think I would have had a heart attack.
- Muliplayer?! I didn't get to test it out, but crazy that you were able to add it in.
Some Notes:
- I always struggle with liminal space games, since the idea behind it is to get lost and confused. It would be nice to offer the player some form of marking tools so they can mark rooms they've been in before.
- I noticed the flashlight in the beginning seamed to have a cone effect, but it worked great in dark environments.
I was able to find 5 of the 7 tapes, but had to call it quits due to time constraints. This was a great entry! Your polish on this were great and again, that voice acting!
Thanks for a great entry!!!
Thanks for playing. Yeah for the marking tools +1. I was actually unhappy with how easy it is to traverse this space since the outer wall is so easy to spot amongst the crazy architecture. I am thinking I want to spice things up to make the outer walls just as crazy as the interior space and along with that I was thinking about adding in one of those little tape tools that lets you leave yourself a red tape trail to see where you've visited so great idea there, I am thinking of some stuff for a post jam update!
I also got scared playing our game and I knew what was coming but the mannequin is somehow scary and yet not at the same time.
Thanks for checking our game out. Maybe it's best you don't play the multiplayer until after the jam. Functionality of walking around and seeing each other walk around is totally great, animations and all. The issues come from the lack of networking on the player sockets and ownership of objects, you can quickly run into synchronization issues with objects if you try to grab them from someone else's hip holster sockets, or even grabbing stuff out of someone else's hands. Anyway thanks for playing, I'll play your game if it has PCVR haha
Very nice - excellent atmosphere. The music was very well suite and really set the mood. It ran really smooth for me on my Quest 2 (I ran the PC version). I didn't find all of the tapes but will give it another go in a little while. Thanks.
Submitted
The Lost SoulThe voice acting on those tapes was spectacular! It adds so much! And on top of everything this was multiplayer? Crazy! I had trouble playing the tapes, but it was plenty creepy for me either way! Awesome job!
Submitted
Moonlight MysteriesHey, I'm wondering what trouble you had playing the tapes. I think maybe it just isn't clear that you have to take the previous tape out of the player before you can put a new one in? Also the floating orbs around the player are like a tape inventory you can store your tapes in. Post jam I think I'll try to make the slot snap in and out of the player so it's clear that the tape is still inside of it and needs to be removed first. There's a few things I wanted to do with the overall gameplay that I wasn't super happy with but thanks again for playing!
Yeah I'm trying to figure out a good way to do the menu. Last game we put it on a button, but the other button was also an action for what was being held and people said they often ran into opening the menu when they wanted to do something else. I don't want to keep people from opening the menu if they are holding something. I'm a little stumped on this one. I'm wondering what a better way to set up the menu would be. I thought wrist or arm buttons were superior but I don't think we got the placement right this time. Any suggestions are welcome!
Great creepy vibe. Very glad you made a certain decision regarding the scare(s) (no spoilers here). Nice accessibility options. I only found three tapes and mazes make me feel super claustrophobic so I had to stop there. Super nice voice acting on the tapes I did find, nice filters on it as well. Nothing like the cringey voice lines in mine. lol
Submitted
Premature IlluminationIt's really impressive that you managed to implement a VR game with a coop multiplayer and procedurally generated levels in just a few days. Great job! 👏🏻
Submitted
Completely dark VRA real eerie atmosphere on this one - you really got the spooky mood just right!
... and the tape vocals added to that and it was a genuinely unsettling experience...
I appreciate it's multiplayer, but realistically I don't think given the amount of players on this Jam that a full game would happen naturally - we'll have to organise a set time to play altogether or something :) So I also played it solo...
A minor issue - I was playing on the Quest and the textures looked odd and flashy at a distance, like they weren't mipmapped or filtered correctly.
All in all, nice idea, great atmosphere and kudos for getting multiplayer in.
Submitted
Dark Panic! VRThanks for playing.
Yeah technically the multiplayer is set up without any kind of matchmaking since I guess we expect if anyone did play they might play with the team mates they ended up working on the jam with, like we did.
Original quest? I'm sorry to hear you had some texture issues. I don't have a quest to test on unfortunately and I am not sure why it would happen that way as the settings for mipmaps etc are what we always use and somehow our last VR jam game worked fine in the quest 2 at least.
Thanks for the review I'll give your game a look as well when I get to playing these games.
Oh I see a lot of moire even in the editor as well, I just assumed it wouldn't be a problem in headset cause when I tested it I didn't notice it, but I'm wondering if I just didn't notice it cause I tuned it out due to seeing it so much during dev. I think it has something to do with the normal maps and such. I actually don't see any issues with the ceilings, but the carpets are big time offenders. Maybe it's just not as noticeable in play due to the very tiny amount of actual light available.
Texture settings are all basically default, but I just checked the textures for the floor and both the normals and the albedo both didn't have mipmaps enabled, not sure why, it is from an asset pack so maybe they had updated the settings. Very strange, turning those options on does make it look a lot better, but I can still see a small amount of moire.
Good to hear the walls were fine though, that's what I was concerned about, flickering walls and such, but thanks for the tip on making my ground a lot better.
Ah, that makes sense... I think you've got it :) Yeah, if the images weren't mipmapped (especially the normals) then that's cause the flicking moire effect I'm seeing. It's not totally overpowering, so it didn't distract from the game at all - but it was something that was noticeable enough mention, that's all :)
That is a cool idea and fits great to the theme. A pretty spooky atmosphere where you never know, what's behind the next corner.
It's really cool, that you made it multiplayer again (remember your western one from the last jam^^). Played it alone so far, but could be nice to play that together.
Had a few smaller problems (e.g. for some reason cassettes #2049 and #2050 didn't snap into the player, and there where "invisible" walls sometimes), also it runned pretty laggy ( unfortunaely noticed it a bit in my stomach already), so that i stopped after the 4th casette. So probably missed the final story, sorry...
But all in all a pretty solid entry and think with some polishment could become a cool experience :-)
Submitted
Button in the DarknessThanks for playing.
I'll be honest it's really weird you ran into issues, in my testing I never had any issues with any of the socket interactors or anything like that and no invisible walls unless you got stuck inside of one of the weird walls but I thought I got it to a point where that wouldn't be possible with the collider set up. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of issues but most of them revolve around the actual multiplayer implementation and not having a good networked XR Socket solution etc. Likewise I'm surprised that it ran laggy as well, do you mind if I ask what specs or device you used? Parker has a fairly old PC at this point and said it was running fine on his, we were seeing like 72 fps(locked framerate due to headset refresh rate) on his, in editor, meaning it should only have been better. I myself had it at 144 in editor and it would even go up to almost 300 without VR (no refresh rate lock imposed by the headset). Parker also said it worked as well standalone as it did on his PC, so yeah not sure what happened there.
One bug I noticed and didn't fix is you can teleport through walls if you stick your arm through it before teleporting.
I'll be honest I haven't gotten to experience the story myself. I spent most of my time working on mechanics and the idea to add the tapes and stuff was a very late addition, I had to leave on the last day so the audio was done and put in by my team mates and I haven't yet heard them all.
Sorry we got you motion sick!
No worries, i stopped before really getting "sick", and no problem, i totally understand that it's hard to optimize in such a short time. it's a thing i also often struggle with. I also know how hard it is to implement multiplayer stuff, and that it expotentially makes stuff ways more complicated. So actually really impressive that you implement that into your jam games :-)
I played the standalone version on a Quest 2 (my Quest 3 did not arrived yet and I'm not the biggest fan of PCVR tbh^^).
Please don't take my feedback "personal" or so. Just tried to give an objective feedback, so that you can improve these things. Was meant totally positive and hope it sounded not mean or so.
No worries there. I just wanted to get an idea of what device so I can try to understand the issues you ran into and see if they are device dependent. I definitely am more the other direction and don't like standalone since PCVR can provide way higher fidelity experiences but this one was low spec enough that it theoretically should have worked fine on standalone, but I didn't test it on a quest 2. Honestly I am very interested in the Augmented reality functionality and experiences that could be crafted with the Quest 3 but I don't have one myself. I'm a big proponent for no exclusives but that kind of stuff would sort of have to be given the lack of capability other hardware is bringing right now and to me that kind of exclusive is fine. I was only bringing up numbers because we were so impressed by the seemingly good performance for it to not be so great kind of sucks. Not sure why it would not work well on a Quest 2 though. We actually didn't do much optimization it was simply a very basic game, mostly cubes and planes, the fact that the level is random also means we can't really bake the occlusion or anything like that. Not a ton we can actually do in regards to optimization there.
As for the multiplayer in this one I'm a little sad because it could have been better but alas timelines and such. Still as I always say I'm trying to make multiplayer games cause that's the kind of game I want to play, I'm a social gamer.
Thanks again for playing!
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