The Bathrooms Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

The Bathrooms’ angle on Backrooms lore is a breath of fresh air, to say the least. Even as we enter a bold new era in which developers actively engage the Backroom ethos to create interwoven passages and unfathomable labyrinthine stories to further expand the core, it still feels as if we’ve so much left to explore. And I suppose that’s where Bathrooms steps in, not with the intent of changing the natural course, but to add its own two cents to its cortex with a side serving of soap, suds, and psychotic clowns.

It didn’t take much for me to realize that The Bathrooms was a low-budget independent game. Hell, it took less than three or four minutes to connect the dots and to find the leaky pipes in the bathroom. It wasn’t the least bit visually inspiring, and a lot of its finest details left a lot to be desired, naturally. Yet, beneath its entry-level craftsmanship was a surprisingly engaging experience that had a lot of frightening implications. The clown was just the icing on the cake, whereas the atmosphere was the one thing that kept me trundling along with my tail tucked firmly between my legs.

If you’re familiar with Slender: The Eight Pages, then you should know how a game like this works. Rather than it having you aimlessly wander through the opaque woods to the beating sound of a drum, however, it opts to put you in a familiar place—a school bathroom, weirdly—and to have you scour the stalls, the squeaky clean rooms, as well as the hallucinogenic dream-like crevices, and locate pots of gold and keys. Because apparently, you have a job to do: to find your way out of the sudsy hellhole and to earn enough gold to essentially buy your way out. It’s a fairly basic concept that doesn’t linger on the mind, but it serves its purpose as a transparent experience that can keep you hooked for the short term.

Etched into this liminal world is, of course, a killer clown. In the spirit of a traditional survival-horror flick, the game requires you to actively search the bathrooms, gather your gold, and evade a formidable foe that prowls your surroundings like clockwork. There’s little room here for you to wage a small war, and sure enough, you cannot simply uproot and defend yourself with two smoking barrels. The gold and the keys are your only chance, and everything else that populates the stalls and its multi-colored corners is merely an inconvenience. But that’s a Backroom game for you, in a nutshell.

The general objective behind The Bathrooms is simple: you enter a tiled space in which your dog is a captive, with a vacuum that can attract gold coins, and an orb that allows you to detect danger and, if you’re lucky, the keys to your beloved companion’s cage. With that, you have a pretty familiar task on your hands. Simply, gold coins can unveil new opportunities, and keys can unlock the cage for your pet. You have an array of slot machines that grant you a chance to double your earnings, and of course, an active predator who bathes in the idea of getting their hands around your neck at any given moment. And believe me when I say, that tends to happen quite frequently. Coulrophobia tenants beware, basically.

As tropey and as ridiculous as The Bathrooms is, it does, believe it or not, make for an oddly thrilling adventure. As short-sighted and as narratively bland as it may seem, it does provide a genuinely entertaining take on an otherwise predictable collect-a-thon affair. Sure, it could do with a lot of extra technical polish, as would it benefit from the addition of a thicker plot, a greater character arc, and a multiplayer mode. Because let’s face it, there is a budget indie here that, while still engaging, doesn’t really tap into its potential as a Backrooms project. While evidently fun in short form, it’s still an experience that sadly bows out just as it begins to find its rhythm.

To further the point, there isn’t a lot of gameplay for you to sink your teeth into here. As far as entry-level horrors go, it works as intended, with a simple hook, a clear objective, and a litter of gimmicky elements that you would naturally expect to find in any bog-standard horror. If, say, you’re not foraging for gold or searching for a key to a door, then you’re biting your tongue, dipping in and out of the enemy’s field of view, and desperately hoping to remain undetected as you trundle around. This is all great for a streamable experience for sure, but that’s about all it has to offer. There are no guarantees of a deeper storyline, no enticing twists or turns to shock you, and no post-game scenarios for those who might be looking to indulge in a greater variety of challenges.

With all of the above said, for the low asking price you do have a perfectly reasonable amount of content to shovel through. Even without the additional fillings—the padded plot, the versatile characters and the grand-scale world—there is still a serviceable horror here that bears all of the usual trappings of a Slender-like collect-a-thon. Thanks to its procedurally generated biome, it also offers a good deal of replay value, too. Does it change enough to keep you second guessing? No. Are you still likely to go back to wash your hands a second, third or fourth time? Probably.

Verdict

The Bathrooms is as equally comical as it is terrifying. While it certainly lacks the depth, the versatility and the complexity of a big-budget survival-horror, it does fit into the Backrooms field surprisingly well, with a liminal tone that’s as equally claustrophobic as it is unsettling, and a common foe that, while somewhat familiar and cliche, provides more than enough energy to get your heart beating as you desperately search for an exit. It’s a good budget horror, if anything, and that in itself is a great thing. A brilliant thing, no — but a solid piece of work that does enough to get the sweat pouring, nonetheless.