Category: Previews (Page 1 of 19)

The Backrooms Viral Marketing Noclips Into An Earlier Era

May 27, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

An early in-universe ad for The Backrooms focusing on Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire

Last month, people started noticing a an advertisement for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire popping up across the internet, advertising amazing deals on furniture. The only indication this wasn’t a low-budget, grainy commercial for a local furniture store is an A24 logo that pops up in the lower right corner of the spot towards the tail end of its run. This video kicked off the viral marketing campaign for the studio’s upcoming film The Backrooms, which releases this coming Friday. And over the past few weeks, the campaign has offered a number of chances for fans to “noclip” into the film’s world.

A scene from Kane Pixels’ Backrooms, where Async researchers find a missing person

The Quick Backstory For The Backrooms

The Backrooms started its life as a creepy internet photograph of unknown provenance. The image depicts a seemingly abandoned retail space with yellowed wallpaper and carpeted flooring lit by the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights. And for years, the photograph was passed around message boards without context as shorthand for “creepy liminal spaces”.

Eventually, the image would be posted to 4chan with the accompanying text, creating a basic vocabulary for The Backrooms:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

A number of creators would return to this concept, but Kane Parsons (posting under Kane Pixels) in particular went on to create a series of videos expanding on the concept that would help define the aesthetic and rules of the world for fans. In this interpretation, The Backrooms is a parallel dimension filled with a seemingly endless maze of hallways and corridors, dotted with “Null Zones” that serve as semi-permeable barriers to clip in and out of the real world. The rules of time and space don’t behave the same in the Backrooms, and objects flowing through the Backrooms might reappear in our world at incongruous times.

According to Parsons’ interpretation, an organization known as the Async Research Institute discovered how to access The Backrooms decades ago. Over the years, the company sent employees in hazmat suits to explore the spaces, in much the same way the SCP Foundation uses Class-D personnel to research otherworldly dangers. Getting lost in the liminal spaces isn’t the only threat to these employees, as a number of dangerous lifeforms stalk the hallways of the Backrooms, including a bacterial entity often referred to as “The Lifeform”.

Left: the original Backrooms photo. Right: another shot of the location taken the same day

Finding the Backrooms, and the Move to the Silver Screen

While the original Backrooms photograph went unidentified for years, lost media fans gradually pieced together the photograph’s history, which appears to have been incorporated into the film itself. And that story starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at 807 Oregon Street. Between 1958 – 1994, the address was home to Rohner’s Furniture, a small business that was a fixture in the town since as early as 1928. Rohner’s abandoned their furniture business in 1994 and the building was acquired by Hobbytown USA in 2003, when the company started blogging about their renovations efforts. One of those progress photos was the now iconic Backrooms photo. Recently, the Oshkosh Public Library created a video going through their own archives to help flesh out this story.

And so, when A24 partnered with Kane Parsons to turn his take on the Backrooms into a feature length film, he drew upon the photograph’s newly resurfaced provenance to place the film’s Null Zone bridge to the Backrooms inside Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture business. Transplanted from Oshkosh to San Jose California, the adaptation is nonetheless paying homage to the image’s history…a theme that comes up quite a bit, in the viral marketing campaign to follow.

Ministry of Lost Things Delivers a Box of Puns with a Side of Puzzles

October 19, 2025 / Michael Andersen

Ministry of Lost Things Lint Condition, next to the newest installment Finders Keypers

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

The gneesters, who happily rehome lost objects into the Elusiverse…even if means a lot to you

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

Early puzzle components from Ministry of Lost Things (some pieces omitted to prevent online solving)

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

I’m Obsessed with Emerald Echoes’ Narrative Hint System

July 19, 2025 / Michael Andersen

PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzletale Emerald Echoes, on Kickstarter through August 2025

PostCurious has a new narrative puzzle adventure called Emerald Echoes crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with the campaign running through August 14th. In many ways, it’s a classic PostCurious game: a series of moderately difficult puzzles strung together to tell a heartfelt story, drawing upon thoughtfully constructed game components designed to draw you into the narrative.

But the reason I’m currently obsessed with Emerald Echoes is how the game reinvents PostCurious’ already strong hint systems, taking the game fully offline in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

Three of the four chapters from Emerald Echoes, delivered in narratively relevant envelopes

Emerald Echoes Finds Puzzlers Returning to the World of The Emerald Flame
Emerald Echoes is framed as a sequel to one of PostCurious’ earliest games, The Emerald Flame. The first game in the series followed Marketa’s research into an alchemical elixir and the often strained relationship that blossomed with Hannah, as told from the player’s perspective as a Koschei Historical Society researcher poring over letters and artifacts from the time in the modern day.

Emerald Echoes picks up where Emerald Flame left off, as people who have come to care for Marketa try and retrace her steps and find her after the events of the first game: a story that is once more told through the perspective of researchers investigating archaeological findings.

Notably, this is a standalone sequel: I played this with a friend who had never played the first installment, and the story still made sense without context from Hannah and Marketa’s prior adventures, although there are the occasional light nods to prior events.

The Ministry of Lost Things Takes PostCurious in an Episodic Direction

October 16, 2024 / Michael Andersen

I have a confession to make: I misplace things all the time. That copy of Ship of Theseus I bought that I was saving for a rainy day? Gone. The transparent lock I used for lockpicking practice? Haven’t seen it in years. My Flynn Lives pin, from the Tron Legacy ARG? Fell off my lanyard at last year’s New York Comic Con, never to be seen again. Many of those lost items are easily replaceable: I still don’t know what happened to my original copy of Ship of Theseus, but I currently have a new copy on my shelf. But some items have enough sentimental value that they can’t be replaced…and that’s where the Ministry of Lost Things comes in.

PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzle game, The Ministry of Lost Things, introduces its players to a world where many of the world’s forgotten or misplaced items make their way to the Elusiverse. Most of these items that disappear from our world are easily forgotten, leading to regions of the Elusiverse overflowing with everything from unwanted receipts to abandoned umbrellas. But sometimes, an item charged with sentimental value goes missing. And it’s up to the Ministry’s Department of Returns to bring those items home.

The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition is positioned as the first in a series of games exploring the Elusiverse, and tasks players with locating one particular item with deep sentimental value attached to it, and returning it to our world. The adventure unfolds across a series of four puzzle packets. Solving a series of puzzles will help narrow down where in the Elusiverse the object can be found, why it meant so much to its previous owner, and where to return it.

Hunting of the Shark: Bookish Highlights From Lone Shark Games

March 25, 2024 / Michael Andersen

Lone Shark Games’ name has come up more than a few times over the years here at ARGNet. Some of those projects, like 2008’s Citizens of Virtue, which created a fictional megachurch to create an interactive morality play, were explicitly designed as alternate reality games. More often than not, though, the company’s projects trend towards puzzle hunts that revel in spectacle in a way that crosses over into territory familiar to alternate reality gaming fans.

Cards Against Humanity’s Holiday Bullshit puzzle experience in 2014, for example, hid puzzles in a series of seasonal mailings that led players to a safe on an uninhabited island containing a quarter of a million custom “Sloth” cards. And then there was VANISH: The Hunt for Evan Ratliff, which sent WIRED journalist Evan Ratliff across the United States as the target of a month-long manhunt, with Lone Shark Games orchestrating a series of clues to help readers hone in on his location. The company has done its fair share of pen-and-paper puzzle hunts, more often than not those puzzles go beyond the page, and ask “what would it look like if we turned Jonathan Coulton’s annual cruise into a boat-wide escape room”. In short: the company excels at live experiences that are hard to reduce onto a single page.

So to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a company, Lone Shark Games is crowdfunding the production of The Hunting of the Shark: 20 Years of Lone Shark Puzzlehunts, which pulls together a highlight reel of nationwide manhunts, ARGs, convention activations, and other puzzle hunts, condensing that into a book of puzzles.

Sample puzzles featured in Hunting of the Shark

The Puzzles Come First (and Last, and Everywhere In Between)
I had the chance to take a look at an early draft of The Hunting of the Shark, and it’s worth stressing that this is first and foremost a puzzle book. The book does provide something of a history of the company by presenting individual puzzles and sometimes even full puzzle hunts from events presented in chronological order, the book largely lets those puzzles speak for themselves, with brief introductions providing context surrounding how those puzzles were initially delivered.

This book is not an oral history of the company: rather, it’s a showcase of some of puzzles worth featuring, designed for events ranging from Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix tournaments to Renton River Days duckstravaganzas. Because of that, the featured puzzles are designed with a wide range of audiences in mind. Some puzzles may be fairly easy for the puzzle-inclined, while others might find one checking the solutions in the back of the book without a group of fellow solvers.

Clue Chasing with Magic’s Ravnica-Themed Puzzle Hunt

December 8, 2023 / Michael Andersen

Murders at Karlov Manor (Wizards of the Coast)

Next February, Wizards of the Coast’s trading card game Magic: the Gathering is releasing a murder mystery expansion named Murders at Karlov Manor, themed after the classic board game Clue. But the clues don’t stop there: in a recent preview of the set, Blake Rasmussen noted that there will be a series of puzzles beginning at the game’s prerelease on February 2nd and culminating in a meta-puzzle that will, once solved, “unlock information about the future of Magic.”

A Brief Primer on Magic: the Gathering’s Story
Before getting into what sounds suspiciously like Magic’s foray into the world of puzzle hunts, a little backstory on how lore functions in Magic: the Gathering might provide some helpful context. Because while Magic is first and foremost a competitive trading card game, the franchise has hidden an overarching story through its expansions. While Magic fans are likely most familiar with experiencing the story through “flavor text” added in the marginalia of the game’s cards, those stories are supplemented and expanded through a series of short stories, comic books, and novels. So what starts as the slow process of piecing together the story of two estranged artificer brothers engaged in a protracted war through narrative snippets and artifacts are expanded upon in novels and short stories that help fill in the gaps.

For the past three years, that story has focused on the war between Planeswalkers and Phyrexians. Within Magic’s lore, Planeswalkers are entities who possess a “spark” that allows them to cross between planes, hopping between the deeply thematic universes and worlds that make up Magic’s Multiverse with relative ease. A race of biomechanical creatures known as Phyrexians don’t naturally possess the ability to cross planes, but stumbled across a number of artificial methods to cross universes in pursuit of their goal of assimilating or destroying all inferior life across the Multiverse.

At first, it started simple. A single Phyrexian infiltrating a plane and spreading chaos and dissent, setting the stage for future invasion. But then, Phyrexians started assimilating Planeswalkers to their side, through a process known as Compleation.

The three year story arc culminated in a massive confrontation that saw Phyrexians and their involuntarily conscripted Planeswalker allies invading practically every known plane. And while the Phyrexians were defeated, in the process something happened that stripped many Planeswalkers of their powers. Currently, Magic’s Multiverse is rebuilding from an inter-planar war, while simultaneously adjusting to life with considerably fewer Planeswalkers capable of crossing those planes. And the most recent expansions have focused on that fallout.

Particularly flavorful cards that provide a taste of what’s to come as the story unfolds

A Magical Murder Mystery
Which brings us to Ravnica: a world with an industrial city the size of its home planet, dominated by competing guilds. Kaya Cassir is a Planeswalker who previously served as leader of the Orzhov Syndicate, although she was replaced by Teysa Karlov when she went to fight against the Phyrexians, returning as one of the few to retain her ability to shift between planes.

Author Seanan McGuire released the first chapter of Murders at Karlov Manor‘s story, setting the stage for murder as Teysa Karlov throws a grand fête for her rival power-brokers in the planet-city. Told from Kaya’s perspective, readers are introduced to a colorful cast of characters before getting left hanging on a cliffhanger, as Kaya chases down a scream from across the manor. Has someone been murdered?

A handful of cards (and their flavor text) have already been spoiled, and it appears that in addition to an actual murder, an attempt has been made on Boros legion guildmaster Aurelia’s life, and the story’s detectives are on a deadline to solve the mystery. Rasmussen noted that this set is particularly heavy on “Story Spotlight” cards that feature key moments of the expansion’s narrative, so fans looking to piece together the narrative on their own will have a lot to work off.