The Backrooms

Genuinely very good page. Much better than when I last saw it. Not much to say here, have my upvote.

Insane formatting is all I can say

I think this might be my favorite page so far, this is definitely a page I'll end up reading again for the fuck of it.

This was super interesting; following the mystery with the forum users was so fun and kept things engaging. And the last offset is just a super satisfying reveal.

This was one I remember from crit night! I'm writing my review off what I remember, but what I remember being really good! I enjoyed the kinda slow burn of figuring out who is doing what, only for it to be somebody pretty out of left field (the Masked Maidens)

I admit I don't know much about them. I've referenced them in 174 before they start with the Wall Mask Experiments, and 320 has them uh… die in a footnote whoops. But from what I know, their means and justifications worked well! I'll get more to that later, though

The format I think does this page wonders, but is also a slight detriment. Though not in any earth ending, world shattering way. The idea of the discussion about this happening on a forum, allowing a lot of discussion to go by fairly quick while still feeling good and exploring things, is good! And on paper, I love the whole sending link thing. But I do know that on the side of the reader, it's not perfect.

I remember from crit night that Scute and the others (I only read during the Asian crit night) that you had to tell us to click the offsets before we read the rest. That's fine, for the record, but I'd argue these are essential parts. I would've suggested to cut up the forums into their own offsets. So for the first offset, where Username980 posts the link to the UEC, I would've ended that offset there. You click the link to the UEC page, read the UEC part, and then when you clink the link to go back you're to the next offset. Where everything from Consul1999 to OddsBetrayU is on it. And so on and so forth.

I do always love seeing the Backrooms from the regular Joe Schmoe's point of view, that's kinda my entire canon's M.O., so I greatly enjoyed this for that reason, too

Back to the Masked Maidens, I do like their plan. The Robovac's were merely a distraction for them to do the actual plan they wanted to do. Some, perhaps me in a worse written page, would argue this makes the Robovac play second fiddle in its own page, but like they're not alive… they're not an object, so it works for me. They're a means to an end, and the entire point of the page is a conspiracy. I suppose the only thing I can doc marks on for that is that the end just… happens. Some schmoe goes "oh hey look the MM took responsibility", and on the theorising front, that's that

The fact the Masked Maidens are a group who have been continuously shafted by others and now want revenge is really nice. Give the Backrooms hell, Vangeline (that's the MM's leaders name right I remember things)

Overall very good page! My review may suffer slightly from a unique disease known as "I remember this page from crit night so didn't reread the whole thing but had to skim it to remember things, therefore my opinions may be scattered and not entirely precise-itus". my doctor tells me its terminal

Holy- What can I even say about this page? Especially considering it does the "lots of GoIs in a big mystery" thing that my con entry does, but with 1000x less bloat: a strict upgrade if you will.

Actually a fair bit!

The stuff that's great is pretty much what everyone else has said: the formatting, all the hoverlinks, the ads on the forums, the story in general really, etc. They're both technically and literarily¹ impressive.

Now the stuff that could be improved on can really be divied into 2 classes: Timeline Typos^™ and the last offset.

We'll start with the last offset. It feels substantially weaker and more underbaked than to the rest of the article. The Masked Maidens just kinda come out and gloat about how they swindled everyone by using the Robovacs as a distraction, a concept which I think wasn't foreshadowed that much, and also is at the hairy edge of reasonability. Like how much of an impact is the presence of a - in the grand scheme of things - relatively minor espionage scandal going to make to the implanting/recruiting of moles into hostile organisations? Not much, I'd reckon. Still, that's a very subjective assessment, so take it with a grain of salt.

As for Timeline Typos^™, they're basically what they sound like. I spotted 2 during my read:

• The title of the Backrooms Robotics Livestream has the string "2021/03/09" at the end. Assuming this is a date, it makes no sense as it would refer to either September 3rd 2021 or March 9th 2021, neither of which are October 9th, 2021, the actual date of the Livestream.
• The clumpshot ad spans a timeskip of -10 months (yes negative 10, we go from from October 2021 to January of the same year). I assume the post-ad dates were meant to be in January 2022.

Despite these complaints, I have to give this page an enthusiastic +1. I'd be hypocritical not to given the absolute state of my entry.