Hey, I did a playtest and have done a write up. If you have any questions, just let me know. I came across a few small bugs that I mentioned, but most of the write up is giving actionable feedback from my POV as a player.
As with all play test feedback, it doesnt mean by opinion is correct. This is just my experience with the game as a player, and hopefully you find it useful as an alternate perspective.
Overall
I played BETWEEN PLACES for around 30 minutes or so. During that time I died once, and then re-clipped, before eventually deciding to quit.
There are elements of the presentation that I like. The overall visual aesthetic is interesting, the chromatic aberration effects are well executed, you did an okay job establishing the setting, and the menu music is fitting, and creates a good sense of mood initially.
My biggest issue is that I experienced essentially no tension, fear, or discomfort during the playthrough. I spent all of my time walking through environments without encountering anything that made me feel threatened and as a result, exploration eventually started to feel empty rather than unsettling.
I also encountered some technical and usability issues, particularly with the inventory, settings, menu presentation and launching the game, which I will outline below.
Overall, well done on making something, but in its current state it feels empty, and tensionless.
First Impressions
The menu gave me a really good first impression. The music was fitting, and the it made it seem like the game was going to present me with a lot of weirdness (which it ultimately never delivered on). While the tone of the menu is good, I think there are some relatively straightforward improvements that could strengthen the first impression.
The glitch effect on the menu text is static. Given the aesthetic you're going for, I think having this subtly animate would make the menu feel considerably more polished.
The menu music is pretty good and fits the atmosphere nicely.
There is a chair (in the top left) being illuminated by a fairly noticeable light, but there isn’t actually a visible source for that light. This stood out to me.
I also didn't initially realise that REALITY meant QUIT. In hindsight I understand the connection, but I don't think it's immediately obvious from a usability perspective. I accidentally quit the game because of this. If you want to keep the current naming, I'd strongly recommend an "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO QUIT?" confirmation afterwards, just in case there are more people like me that didn’t put two and two together.
Menu and UI
I'm personally not a fan of some of the deliberately obscure menu terminology.
Options such as "WHAT'S THAT?" and "SHH" have personality, but I don't think that personality is currently worth the reduction in usability. When I'm navigating a menu, I generally want to immediately understand where each option will take me. You can give menu labels character, but I would try to find a balance where their function is still obvious at a glance.
If you pause the menu during gameplay, you can see some of your menu elements are not aligned correctly. This is relatively minor, and is a quick fix to sort out.
I didn’t change any graphical settings before starting a new game, and once I was in game threre was no way to enable VSYNC.
Technical Issues
The .exe didn't launch on the second attempt I made to open the game after accidentally quitting.
When I eventually got it running again, the audio was extremely quiet. After checking the settings, I found that both audio sliders had somehow been set to zero.
I'd recommend allowing the important display options to be changed from the in game settings menu rather than requiring the player to leave their current session.
Inventory
The inventory didn't appear to function correctly during my playthrough. I collected items, including bars and drinks, but couldn't find a way to actually consume them. This affected my run as I could see my sanity depleting but there was nothing I could do to stop that. I later died with an inventory of about 9 bars, and 8 drinks.
Exploration and Pacing
I have played many Backrooms games, and they just never really create a scary environment. Big empty levels just aren’t tense or fear inducing for me. I would ask yourself what the main emption you’re trying to evoke is. When the whole game feels empty, there is no desire for me to progress, or to explore. I didn't encounter enough variation, interaction or meaningful threat to make exploration feel purposeful. After around 20 minutes, I reached a particularly long section requiring me to crouch, only to eventually reach a dead end. That was the point where my motivation dropped considerably as I was already just walking through quite an empty level, and now I was going to have to backtrack while crouching through one.
I did continue a little further and eventually reached the ladder area containing two pages. After this, because I couldn't use the items in my inventory, I eventually died and reached the ERROR... 404 screen.
I think the key question I'd ask when reviewing these areas is:
"What is the player experiencing or anticipating while travelling through this space?"
Walking through a long corridor can work in horror, but there needs to be a reason that walking through it creates an emotion. That could be uncertainty, vulnerability, anticipation, environmental storytelling, navigation decisions, audio cues or the possibility of encountering something dangerous. Without those elements, a long corridor risks simply feeling like a long corridor, and that’s how this game felt to me.
Horror and Tension
Across approximately 20 minutes, I would personally rate the fear I experienced as 0/10. Others will find this more appealing Im sure, but I never felt particularly vulnerable and, more importantly, I became increasingly confident that I wasn't going to encounter anything. Once I as a plater develop that confidence, the environments stopped creating tension. In contrast, I am currently playing through Resident Evil 1 on PS1, and that is creating tension constantly. Im constantly hoping to find more bullets. I hardly ever have enough herbs, and every encounter is a risk.
This is worth emphasising because I'm generally very susceptible to horror games. It doesn't take much to make me uncomfortable when I believe something could actually happen. Here, however, I didn't develop that expectation. For horror to work, I don't necessarily think you need to constantly put enemies in front of the player What I think is missing is credible uncertainty. Make me question whether the sound behind me actually means something. Give me a reason to hesitate before entering the next room. Occasionally change something when I return to an area. Establish rules and then subtly violate them. Give me glimpses of something without immediately explaining it. The player doesn't necessarily need to be in danger all the time, but I think they need to believe that they might be.
Audio
There were occasions where I triggered sounds such as knocking and other environmental effects. The idea is good, but the individual effects often felt disconnected from the environment. Some also contain quite a lot of background noise, which gives them the impression of having come from different sources (like FreeSound) rather than belonging to the same soundscape. I'd recommend doing an audio consolidation pass. Even when using free sound libraries, processing the sounds so they share similar EQ, reverb, volume and environmental characteristics can help them feel like they were created specifically for the same game. More importantly, I would connect these sounds more closely to the horror design. A knock becomes much more effective if the player starts wondering what caused it. If environmental sounds repeatedly occur without consequence, I eventually learn that they're harmless background effects. The sounds you trigger at points, are not actually that bad, they just feel very disconnected, and don’t add to the tension.
If you’ve not heard of FMOD or WWISE, I would look at building some tension, rather than just triggering sounds. Use them to build over time, rather than using instant triggers that feel out of place.
Environmental Presentation
The visual aesthetic itself is one of the stronger aspects of the game. I like the overall presentation of the environments, and there are some creative choices here that fit the surreal Backrooms inspired setting. The background hum from the fluorescent lighting works particularly well for establishing the space. It does become somewhat repetitive over longer periods, but as an environmental detail it contributes nicely to the identity of the world. You have put together an interesting environment but I do think you need to build on that.
The chromatic aberration is also pretty well implemented. In particular, the visual effect used when dying and respawning or "reclipping" into the environment works well and feels considerably more polished than some of the surrounding systems. If you asked me to pick out the single best small detail of this game, that is it for me.
I think there's a solid atmospheric foundation here. The bigger challenge is giving the environments enough gameplay and tension to complement that presentation.
Story and Collectable Pages
I found the collectable pages a bit too long. I made the effort to read the material about Brie and Carly, but I wasn't receiving enough payoff for the amount of information I was being asked to absorb. In a game where the player is primarily exploring, stopping to read long passages of text interrupts the pacing, and becomes more of an inconvenience over time than something positive. I'd consider either reducing the amount of pages, or just shorten some of the text, and if possible, maybe look at communicating more of this information through the environment itself. You could also ask yourself a broader design question:
"If I removed these pages, would the game lose part of its identity?"
Based on what I played, I'm not sure that it currently would (though admittedly I didn’t finish it). Reading about Brie and Carly should ideally change how I interpret something I'm seeing, reveal something I'm looking for, make me concerned about what happened to them, or establish information that later pays off. Otherwise, the pages risk becoming lore that exists alongside the game rather than storytelling that strengthens it.
Player Emotions
At some points I definitely experienced curiosity, such as when I first came across a door, or the area with the blue outline leading through a wall. I was initially intrigued by the visual aesthetic, but these decreased over time as nothing happened.
Fear remained at essentially 0/10 throughout the playthrough. I didn't experience much frustration either. Even when I encountered issues such as the inventory not working, my reaction was more that I was losing motivation to continue than becoming actively frustrated, though I knew it would ultimately lead to me dying.
I think that's an important distinction. Frustration can sometimes mean that the player is invested and wants to overcome something. My bigger concern here is that I wasn't particularly worried about what was going to happen next.
Final Thoughts
BETWEEN PLACES has an interesting visual foundation. I like the overall aesthetic, the environments have some strong atmospheric qualities, the menu is fairly inviting (even if I don’t personally think the game matches that), and effects such as the chromatic aberration during respawning are nicely executed.
For me, the biggest area to focus on is giving that atmosphere something to support. At the moment, there is a lot of walking but very little anticipation attached to that walking. Environmental sounds happen, but I quickly stopped believing they represented a threat. I found pages, but the information didn't meaningfully affect how I understood or interacted with the world. I collected survival items, but couldn't use them.
The result was that I never really felt threatened, which just leads to loss of motivation as a player.
There are definitely some good creative ideas in there. I think the next step is making sure the gameplay, horror design and environmental storytelling give players a reason to care about moving through that world.