Solo game developer, Numor Games, has partnered with indie game publisher Top Hat Studios for their very first game, titled The Backworld. Since being first unveiled on Numor Games’ YouTube channel in 2022, The Backworld has been proudly described by its creator as a Backrooms-inspired RPG, where exploration is a main focus of gameplay. While the horror subgenre of the Backrooms and liminal spaces is massively popular on the internet, many people likely still don’t know what you are talking about if you were to bring it up in everyday conversation.

The core idea of the Backrooms began on 4Chan in 2019, where a user posted an image of an eerie location—now known to be a renovated Hobbytown store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin—given a caption that describes the poster glitching out of reality and ending up in an endless maze filled with unknown entities called the Backrooms. Due to the anonymous nature of its creation, a single creator cannot be credited with conceiving the core idea behind the Backrooms. As a result, the concept has been essentially left as an open-source storytelling medium—a phenomenon not all too uncommon for internet horror subgenres, as the same thing occurred for the SCP Foundation. That being said, the most well-known artist to popularize the trend of liminal spaces on the internet was Kane Parsons, with his 2022 short film titled ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’, which depicted the location of the original Wisconsin liminal space photograph in a haunting CGI environment that comes almost too close to looking like real life.

Numor Games pays homage to its predecessors in the liminal space genre, while bringing its own concepts to the table with new liminal space types shown off throughout the most recent trailer released on September 23. The original Oshkosh photograph location is artfully remade in pixel graphics, with its patterned wallpaper walls, stained a sickly yellow hue by the flickering and buzzing fluorescent bulbs overhead.

While inspiration from the Backrooms clearly runs deep in The Backworld’s veins, other pixel art RPG games in this same genre are notable inspirations for Numor Games, as he highlights three well-known horror-themed turn-based games in the description of the game’s latest trailer. These inspirations include Omocat’s Omori, Kikiyama’s Yume Nikki, and Miro Haverinen’s Fear and Hunger. Despite these listed inspirations from Numor himself, trailer footage for The Backworld depicts overworld and battle footage that both pay direct homage to the RPG series that likely inspired all of the ones named before it, Hal Labs’ Earthbound or Mother series. Though it is as on the nose and recognizable as possible, The Backworld is, in fact, yet another turn-based RPG inspired by the Mother series. Character and enemy designs, environments, trailer music, and even the user interface, when in the midst of turn-based combat, pay homage beautifully to the classic Nintendo RPG.

With a planned release date for PC gamers via Steam set sometime just on the horizon, this coming 2026, RPG fans had better be on the lookout for this exciting new game that is taking inspiration from all of the greats, this time with a liminal twist.