Developer PaisleyBoxers has released Backrooms 32X, a first-person Backrooms game built for Sega’s 1994 32X expansion. The project matters less because the internet needs another yellow-wall horror maze, and more because PaisleyBoxers is trying to squeeze a modern-ish first-person engine into a console add-on with severe limits.
The game’s page pitches it with the line, “welcome to the cutting edge of 1994.” The joke is doing some work. PaisleyBoxers says Backrooms 32X runs on original Sega 32X hardware, with a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly, with some help from Anthropic’s Claude AI.
The result is a Backrooms-style exploration game: beige rooms, fluorescent lighting, damp-carpet dread, and exits that lead to more exits. PaisleyBoxers says the game includes procedurally generated levels, so the floor plan can keep producing new liminal corridors rather than relying only on hand-authored layouts.
Players are not limited to generated spaces. The project also supports community-made maps, and PaisleyBoxers provides a browser-based level editor for building them. That is a smart concession for a genre built around repetition, because even procedurally generated beige can become too efficient at being beige.
What the 32X is being asked to do
PaisleyBoxers lists the technical pieces behind the game as a set of small flexes that add up. Backrooms 32X uses both SH-2 processors in the 32X for rendering, according to the developer. Its raycaster draws textured DDA walls, distance fog, dynamic ceiling lighting, thin partition walls, and half-height cubicle dividers that players can see over.
The game also has crawling and crouching with a changing eye-height perspective, letting the player squeeze through crawlspaces. PaisleyBoxers says the intro is live 3D rather than pre-rendered footage, which is the kind of detail that only retro hardware people would brag about, correctly.
Raycasting is the same broad rendering family associated with early first-person games: the engine casts rays through a 2D map to decide what wall slices to draw on screen. PaisleyBoxers’ feature list makes clear this is not a video playback trick or a flat maze with a first-person coat of paint. It is a real-time renderer doing enough scene work to sell the Backrooms routine on a machine from the mid-1990s.
On original hardware, PaisleyBoxers recommends a six-button Sega controller rather than the standard three-button pad to get full control of crawling, crouching, and movement. Players do not need the original add-on or a flash cartridge, though. The developer says Backrooms 32X works on MiSTer FPGA and 32X-capable emulators including RetroArch, BlastEm, Ares, and Kega Fusion.
Backrooms 32X is available as a free 1.5MB ROM-ready download through itch.io, according to PaisleyBoxers. The developer also says the project is open source and available on GitHub. For a horror game about endless corporate-yellow rooms, the most unsettling part may be that the 32X is still being made to earn its keep.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
