The BackShift

Welcome to the BackShift. Submitted on the 26th of June 2026, for the USYD 2026 Game Jam Competition.

Your 9-5 is tiring work, even more so when it's 5 minutes to the end of the day and your boss has that look in his eyes like he's going to ask you to do some overtime. 

Attempting to avoid catching your bosses eye you’ve managed to stumble into The Backrooms, and you know what? You don't get why everyone was so keen to escape.

Since you are still connected to your company's wifi, and so getting paid for your time, all that is left is to enjoy the peace and quiet, and avoid your boss until the end of the day! Although something about this place has made the feeling of being caught by him less like the threat of overtime, and more lethal? But that's just a weird feeling.

You decide to sneak into your bosses room; he hasn't been in the office today. You get curious and look into this secret room that he tells everyone to leave alone, and you enter, but its not something that you ever could have expected...

The game is submitted for the USYD game jam with a theme of 'Flipping the Script'. Although perhaps not incredibly explicit, the game shows this theme by making the Backrooms about survival, and not purely escape. In typical backroom games, you need to find clues to escape, but here, you want to survive, as escaping may mean more trouble for you; you are playing from the perspective of a survivalist, which flips the typical backroom script of 'escaping'. Due to the 3 day timeline, the game is optimised; including survival/horror gameplay and a sophisticated algorithm for the 'boss' (literal boss); the BOSSAI.cs includes pathfinding, mapping using Nav Mesh, and an algorithm where the boss has hearing and sight properties related to noise created by the player; in which the boss ultimately tries to capture the player. Your job is to hide, and survive 5 minutes without dying or being caught.

This game is a demo, and has an originally made horror soundtrack for the Menu and Game; and future plans are plentiful. We envision a level system with many maps, a completely custom made and rebranded UI, HUD and other graphical systems, as well as better performance. If given the chance, we would like to create an introductory level, as well as other features in this first level of the backrooms; where the user finds clues regarding to what the boss is doing here, and similarly, instead of escaping, it leads the player down a much deeper rabbit hole, unlocking even deeper rooms within the backrooms, with more secrets... We hope that the main selling point of this demo, is the horror aspect. The lighting, and especially the 3D audio is designed to trigger jump scares and genuine fear in players.