Seclusion Review (PC)

The world’s unnatural obsession with liminal spaces, abstract ideas, and The Backrooms’ bottomless and barren repository has seemingly birthed yet another psychological dimension for its own family tree. In this world—Seclusion—there are no happy endings, only winding corridors and illogical synergies, decrepit fever dreams and inexplicable fears of solitude and perpetual doom. Here, in this hand-drawn love letter to The Backrooms, there is no carrot for you to chase, but rather, a lukewarm promise—an incentive that bears no emotional weight whatsoever, but one that reluctantly offers you the chance to flee at the expense of your mental wellbeing.

Seclusion isn’t your run-of-the-mill horror story; it’s a nonlinear tale that fosters hallmark fixtures like procedurally generated environments, unorthodox puzzles, and liminal spaces that serve little to no purpose to the narrative. It’s a game that magnifies the complexity of the human mind—a testament, if you will, to how our deepest, dankest thoughts can transform even the brightest images into poster children for sleep paralysis. Here, you won’t find any structure or guiding lights to usher you in the right direction — only inescapable fears and a lingering sense of uncertainty that orbits you like a scythe.

Seclusion is a lot of things, but a complete game it most certainly is not. That isn’t to say that it’s without a substantial amount of material to work through, mind you. However, for the sake of sticking to the same page, it is worth mentioning that, at least at the time of writing, Seclusion is still a few months from fulfilling its roadmap promises. If you can excuse the fact that it’s currently without its self-contained Explorer Mode and co-op mode, then you should consider sticking with us a while longer as we hobble around in the darkness together.

In Fever Dreams We Trust

Seclusion does have a point, though you would need to be something of an intuitive observer to figure out what that point is. But that’s The Backrooms, in a nutshell: a cascading series of illogical ideas that, as if to illustrate its fixation on nonlinear concepts, makes it a priority to keep you second guessing your next move and forever working to unveil whatever dark secrets nest beneath a collection of unfamiliar settings. And that’s sort of what you spend the majority of your time doing here: scooting around in a selection of seemingly abandoned buildings—wards, lounges, bunkers, and other unusual places—and doing whatever feels natural, whether it’s following a set of arrows that take you even deeper into the world, locating clues that help provide context to the history, or evading whatever ominous threats that may or may not lurk within the shadows.

As Seclusion is a psychological horror game at heart, the game itself pours its heart and soul into capturing an ambiance that is both unsettling and oftentimes disturbing. With areas that constantly twist and bend, entities that prey on your senses, and procedurally generated clues that often fail to point you in the right direction, the game makes a genuine effort of making it so that you feel isolated and without a guiding light to keep you company. And it does it well, too. Of course, it doesn’t always make sense, but that’s sort of what you come to expect when picking up anything that pays tribute to The Backrooms: a lack of context and a rabbit hole that produces more questions than answers. It’s tedious, I’ll admit — but it does the job.

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Thankfully, Seclusion isn’t just about walking from one anchor point to the next. As it turns out, there is a lot more for you to carve away at, with several of the rooms in question requiring a little extra time and effort to solve. For example, some of the areas contain entities—disturbingly grotesque stalkers who tend to exacerbate your anxiety by manipulating the scene to elevate the tension and give you something to think about alongside the traditional puzzle pieces. There are also items of interest for you to locate—fragments of historical interest that, once acquired, essentially flesh out the barrage of questions that you might tally up along the way.

For a game that capitalizes on the usual liminal spaces of a textbook Backroom, there is a surprising amount of detail in the setting itself. Visually, it boasts a lot of intriguing locations and a good thematic feel to each of their respective settings. I can’t bring myself to say that it’s an artistic masterpiece, but the attention to detail is something to celebrate, for sure. The fact that these locations mesh well with the fluid camera movements and general transitions, too, makes it all the more inviting.

Verdict

The mind continues to boggle in its ongoing quest to understand The Backrooms’ ever-spiraling trajectory through abstract images I cannot simply describe. In Seclusion, this harrowing mind of mine continues to stray further from the realm of plausible explanations. I don’t know where I am, or even what it is that I’m doing a lot of the time. But I feel curious. I feel that the further I sink, the more I learn. And in this world, especially, I just can’t shake the feeling that there is something else hiding behind the curtain, be it another clue or a mysterious entity guised as an object of sentimental value. In most cases, it’s neither — and that’s what pulls me even further into its clutches: the not knowing what comes next.

I’d like to imagine that fans of The Backrooms and its bottomless catalog of spin-off iterations will get a kick out of shoveling through Seclusion in the dark for a few hours or so. Of course, I can’t quite comment on a lot of its inner workings, for the current version is still short of the whole story. Without the co-op survival mode in place, it seems that I might have to return to the inner boroughs of Seclusion to see what I might’ve missed during the first romp through The Backrooms. And yet, even with the material that it does have to offer, I still find that it’s an easy one to recommend. And so, if you, like me, enjoy psychological torment and a concerning amount of liminal spaces, then chances are you’ll enjoy subjecting yourself to the temptation of tiptoeing through Forgeworks Studio’s ode to the cult phenomenon.