BACKROOMS ANOMALY news & patch notes

• Added missing Simplified and Traditional Chinese artwork.
• Filled gaps in translated UI text and cleaned up a few localization fallbacks.
• Added a contextual, input-aware flashlight reminder for new players. It stays out of the way if you already know the control.
• Fixed Escape opening the menu during startup.
• Fixed a short window where the player could move before the game was ready.
• Fixed the Warden’s shadow on lower graphics settings.
• Improved several audio and visual details across the demo.
• Made the related-games section load faster and update more reliably.
• Miscellaneous stability and presentation fixes.

• On low graphics settings the game skips real-time shadows to keep the framerate up, which left the warden with no shadow at all, floating over the carpet. He has one again now. Nothing fancy, but he looks like he's actually standing in the room.
• More performance work for weak GPUs: motion blur is off on the Low preset, and the framerate should hold steadier on machines around minimum spec.
• For the last few days the demo was starting in English for almost everyone, regardless of your language settings. That was a mistake in our store configuration on Steam, and Simplified Chinese players got hit hardest by it. Sorry about that. It's fixed, and the game is also smarter about it now: if Steam reports English but your system is set to a language we ship, the game follows your system language. Picking a language manually in the settings still beats everything.

A new settings menu

• We rebuilt the settings menu from scratch. It's full-screen now and easier to read, especially on a Steam Deck.
• Controller navigation got rebuilt with it.
• Quitting the game now asks for confirmation.
• New installs start at a better default brightness.

Anomalies

• Added visual cues to an audio anomaly.
• One anomaly was almost impossible to spot on low graphics settings. We made it more visible.
• Fixed an anomaly whose texture broke on Intel Arc graphics cards.
• Fixed the warden not casting a shadow near certain lights.
• Fixed the warden sometimes already being out of place at the start of a new run.
• Bug fixes to an anomaly.

Lighting and graphics

• Rebuilt the lighting of an anomaly for low-graphics cards.
• Fixed a couple of objects that are supposed to glow in the dark and didn't.

Stability and fixes

• Fixed a crash that could hit on the very first launch, while the game was still preparing shaders.
• Quitting to the menu in the middle of the guided first corridors no longer skips the rest of them when you come back.

New player experience

• Your first two corridors are now guided. The first is always clean, the second always has an anomaly, and the wrong exit stays locked until you make the right call. Get both right and the game stops holding your hand: every corridor after that draws from the full anomaly pool.
• If you head for the exit on your first pass without checking the side rooms, the game now points it out.

Anomalies

• Visual pass on one of the anomalies, now with real-time physics.
• New sound effect for the flickering corridor light.

Controls, saves, accessibility

• All menus work with controller and keyboard now.
• Added a colorblind mode.
• Saves sync through Steam Cloud.
• Menus display correctly on ultra-wide monitors.
• Pausing actually pauses the game now.

Performance and graphics

• First launch picks better default graphics settings for your hardware.
• Added a Lighting Quality setting and a resolution scale slider.
• Fixed corridor lighting looking wrong on the Low setting.
• Fixed texture problems on 2 GB graphics cards (GTX 760 / R7 260X class).
• Shadow rendering optimizations for older machines.

Localization

• Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai system languages are now detected correctly.
• Menu and hint text is translated in every supported language, and longer hints no longer get cut off.

Fixes and small things

• Escape no longer re-opens the pause menu right after closing it.
• The settings menu fits on screen without scrolling on more displays.
• Added a wishlist link for the full game to the pause menu.
• Added anonymous crash detection so we can catch stability problems faster.

We pushed a new version of the demo. Most of it comes straight from what people reported.

Stuff players kept running into:

• no way to turn down the motion blur or the VHS filter

• mouse sensitivity was fixed, and there was no shadow option for weaker GPUs

• the full-game preview card sometimes showed up as a black box when Steam was slow to load its image

• the wooden doors shut too fast to actually look around

• a couple of small things that broke the mood, like a sign on the back of a door and a noticeboard calendar that gave September 31 days

What we changed:

• There's a proper settings page in the menu now. Motion blur can be off, subtle, or full, the VHS filter has an on/off toggle, you can pick a shadow quality, and you can set mouse sensitivity. It all applies right away, no restart.

• Added a How to Play card to the main menu so first-timers know what they're looking for.

• Redid the posters in the corridor and fixed where they sit on the walls.

• Doors now stay open a few seconds longer (six instead of three).

• Fixed the black-box preview card, hid the stray sign behind the door, fixed the calendar, and trimmed the pre-run stats screen down to a single Continue button.

• Went back over the translations in all 103 languages.

The demo is free. If you played an earlier version, it's worth another look, and if something feels off, let us know. That's usually how these fixes end up happening.

The demo, rebuilt.

A few of you hit the same handful of problems with the old demo:

• a separate launcher window that opened a new copy of the game every time you clicked Play;

• "Could not find the Webview2 runtime" on Steam Deck and Linux;

• runs where no anomalies spawned at all;

• crashes on lower-VRAM laptops.

So we rebuilt it. The launcher is gone, the menu is in the game now. The anomaly RNG was rewritten. Virtual shadow maps and ray tracing are off by default for stability on smaller GPUs. Play the new demo: Backrooms Anomaly releases this June! If you want to be notified on launch, wishlist the full game here.

Attention explorers, dreamers, and thrill-seekers! Backrooms Anomaly is now part of Steam Next Fest. Step into the looping fluorescent-lit corridors of your worst liminal nightmare and see if you can perceive the distortions between reality and anomaly.

What to expect in the demo:

- Wander through eerie, endless office corridors

- Keep your senses sharp to spot subtle changes in posters, furniture, and lighting

- Return to the entrance to report anomalies

- Get 10 correct predictions in a row to uncover the truth

Join us now during Next Fest and help shine a light on the hidden corners of reality. Don’t forget to wishlist the game to stay updated on release news!

Happy hunting, and don’t stay too long.

Hello Backrooms lovers!

I'm excited to share Backrooms Anomaly, an anomaly hunting game set in the Backrooms, now has a demo on steam!

What's the game about? You're trapped in a looping corridor with fluorescent lights and yellowed wallpaper. Your task is simple yet nerve-wracking: spot the anomalies that appear in your environment. When you notice something has changed, retreat to the entrance. When everything seems normal, proceed to the exit. But be careful - only 10 correct predictions in a row will set you free.

What Lurks in the Corridor? BACKROOMS ANOMALY plays with your sense of reality. Every run through the corridor might reveal new changes - a misplaced poster, shifted furniture, or something more unsettling. As you progress, the pressure builds, knowing that one wrong move will reset your escape counter back to zero.