This Liminal Horror Video Game Is Already Destined To Be The Next Backrooms

A big part of both the liminal spaces aesthetic and its offshoot, liminal horror, is taking indelible images of childhood and subverting them in eerie and uncomfortable ways. A McDonald’s Play Place, an indoor water park, or perhaps something as seemingly esoteric as an image of a house on a hill from an eye examination; it’s all ideal source material for liminal horror. In fact, all those examples have been staples of the liminal space/horror aesthetics for years, and now there’s a horror game based entirely on the eye exam image. With “Backrooms” leading one of the most important weekends at the box office and video game adaptations proving to be a reliable alternative to the flagging superhero genre, it’s surely only a matter of time before this latest game becomes Hollywood’s next big box office success story.

“Farsight” was announced June 1, 2026 via IGN and is a liminal first-person horror game from Studio Noori which puts you inside the images used in an optometrist’s autorefractor machine. The most memorable of these graphics is the house in a field at the end of a long pathway, but there’s also the hot air balloon hovering above a road in a similarly sparse field. All of these images will be immediately familiar to anybody who’s ever had an eye test, and the “Farsight” reveal trailer showcases a game that looks to have captured all their inherent creepiness. It also has movie adaptation written all over it.

Hollywood is infamously obsessed with leveraging our collective nostalgia with established IP, and “Farsight” might be the most simple distillation of that approach: a film based solely on our recognition of a single image. Yet, there’s so much to explore when viewing this one eye exam picture through the lens of liminal horror. That might be why liminal space creators have used it for so long, why the developers behind “Farsight” saw fit to create an entire game based on it, and why Hollywood should take note.

The official “Farsight” website explains how players will find themselves “trapped inside the world of an eye exam machine,” and challenged to find their way “through eerie liminal spaces and uncover the truth to find a way back home.” In the game, a release date for which is yet to be confirmed, players take on the role of a young boy named Noah, whose trip to the optometrist “spirals into something far stranger.” “When the exam begins, the eye clinic disappears,” reads the official synopsis, “leaving vast fields under a pale sky and a hot air balloon. Distant figures watch from the horizon. Somewhere, a safe house beckons its windows warm and inviting.”

Kane Parsons’ skin crawling liminal nightmare “Backrooms” was the quintessential liminal horror film simply due to the IP having been one of the cornerstones of the genre for years. But as films like 2023’s “Skinamarink,” and one of 2024’s best horror movies “I Saw the TV Glow” have demonstrated, there is a growing appetite for not only liminal horror but films that take their cues from online aesthetics more generally — and the eye exam image is a fixture of those very aesthetics.

In 2023, a movie arrived that hinted at what appeared to be a burgeoning cinematic revolution. Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink” represented the real frontier of filmmaking, not because of any cutting-edge CGI but because it gained attention by seeming to encapsulate the consciousness of a generation raised on the internet. “Skinamarink” was by no means a blockbuster, but it earned $2.1 million on a $15,000 budget — and it did so with what was essentially a montage of images inspired by aesthetics with a distinctly online provenance.

Specifically, liminal horror, weirdcore, and analog horror aesthetics were at the heart of Ball’s kinder-trauma nightmare, and it was subversive in the best way possible. The movie didn’t follow established filmmaking rules, instead manifesting its own kind of liminal fever dream that culminated in one of the most deeply unsettling final shots yet seen in a modern horror. Of course, the film earned significant flak for its unorthodox approach, but for those who recognized its internet-based inspirations, it felt quietly revolutionary.

That revolution now appears to be picking up steam with “Backrooms” ruling the box office at a time when a whole generation of online horror creators has started to make waves at the multiplex. As /Film’s BJ Colangelo put it, the future of horror filmmaking is YouTube (if you’re a dude, that is). But the future of horror filmmaking is more than just YouTube. It’s the internet generation as a whole, and thus far these eye exam images — of all things — have proved potent at evoking the kind of dark nostalgia that characterizes the online liminal space and liminal horror ethos. If I were a development executive I’d try to secure the rights to “Farsight” as soon as possible.