Last week, a new trailer was released for The Backworld, a new horror RPG inspired by internet "creepypastas", and games like Mother 3 and EarthBound.
It is currently in development for PC (for Steam and itch.io) and is the creation of the YouTuber / game developer Numor Games, who first unveiled he was working on the title back in July 2022.
According to videos on his YouTube channel, he was first inspired to create the game after coming across The Backrooms — an internet creepypasta that originated from an image of an old hobby store undergoing a renovation that was posted on a 4Chan thread back in 2019. In case you're not familiar, this was a community-created story that focused on the existence of an eerie fictional location that could accidentally be accessed by no-clipping out of reality.
This creepypasta went on to inspire a web series from the director Kane Parsons, is the subject of an upcoming film from A24 (also directed by Parsons), and has already influenced a bunch of video games on Steam and elsewhere. According to Numor Games, though, he doesn't intend to pull from any of these existing sources, instead deciding to take The Backrooms' core concept and put "his own spin on [it]".
The game sees players taking control of a character who has slipped between the cracks of reality into a broken world where danger awaits, with the player being tasked with recruiting a diverse group of companions to fend off enemies and stop the Backworld from consuming everything.
It is a Mother-like RPG and features a similar art style to that series's 16-bit iterations but also contains some notable differences. Because the project is horror-themed, players are encouraged to avoid getting into unnecessary battles, with levelling instead emerging from exploring the world and discovering items with unique abilities and passives. Also, unlike many RPGs, outside of turn-based battles, players are not exactly safe, with various environmental hazards existing in the world that will cause people to have to always be on their guard.
Right now, there is no precise release date listed for the game, with the Steam page simply indicating it is targeting Q1 2026. If you're interested in keeping up to date with the project, you can wishlist the game to be alerted when it is closer to release.