In The Complex: Found Footage, you play the explorer in the footage of a VHS Tape being played back of "The Complex", a giant, sprawling, long running, backrooms-inspired place in another dimension that is said to have one "unrecognizable" entity, and otherwise, just is a walking simulator in a creepy, liminal, and interesting (to me) atmosphere. THis was one of the games I downloaded because of YouTube, and because I liked Pools more mature art-museum-like take vs. something like Esacepe The Backrooms which would require me to be ducking under tables to dodge Partygoers (backrooms entities). Instead "The Complex" is all about exploring, exploring the rooms, exploring nooks, crannies, crevicies, and finding neat places to put things.

The Complex: Found Footage is one of the hardware-heaviest games I have ever played to this point. NONE of my computers will run it except one - the FrankenDell XPS 15 9550 Piecision Portable Workstation (basically, a pieced together mish mash of Dell Precision, Latitude, and XPS parts from my junk bin and e-bay). The reason why, this is one of those games that needs one of those expensive and high powered GPUs to work (in this case, an NVIDIA GeForce Accelerator on top of an Intel HD Graphics 530 on-board). This is my main gaming rig - not many can say they truly built thier "gaming laptop" - but I have been a Dell Technician officially off/on for the last 20 years as an auxilary to my regular I.T. Work, and I also have built numerous laptops at home and at work by "kit bashing" different models with compatible parts together, but not just Dell (NEC Versa M/75 is another "masterpiece").

How I got this running on Proton? Well. I use -dx11 in my startup switches, and I use Proton Version 7.06 to run the game in Linux Mint (whatever the latest is). It was so fiddly. I THINK I might have gotten it working ONCE on another, less as high powered computer (my previous Dell I just sold) but it ran like absolute shit, actually, it pushes the poor Piecision XPS (My own model name) to it's absolute limits on the first level. Running windowed at 1080x768. Once you get to the second level, it starts running REALLY Good, like full 60fps. If I want that in the first level, I think I have to drop down to 640x480 or some other really low resolution. I think a lot of this is the graphics trying to looks like a full on VHS Camera from the early 1990's (the footage takes place in 1990).

The first level is pretty familiar at first, being as it's a euclidean version of Level 0 of the backrooms (euclidean is a geometry term that means relating to or denoting the system of geometry based on the work of Euclid and corresponding to the geometry of ordinary experience. "Euclidean geometry") - or for you non-mathmatical laypeople, it means if you walk forward into the bathroom from the hallway, then turn around and walk out of the bathroom through that same door, you end up back in the hallway, not the kitchen - get my drift? The catch though, is level "0" is HUGE!!! THere's a huge section that's the classic berber carpet and yellow wallpaper, though I don't think the lights hum enough. But if you wander far and wide enough, you can find a unlit grocery store, a pool area, something that looks like a nail salon waiting room, an art museum..glimpses of retreads of other levels from the Backrooms lore, and they all look cool. Level transitions are handled by the use of Elevators.

More Spoilers....Level 2 is the PoolRooms, and has a lot to explore, but is so much smaller, I can run through it in about 2 minutes. Level 3 is some kind of hotel/motel thing, Level 4 is another instance of Level 0 with a higher ceiling, and level 5 is outdoors....all to come to a conclusion obviously inspired by Kane Pixels work. Overall though, it has this murky late 80's/early 90's atmosphere I kind of like, sort of like some of the weirder fever dreams I've had as a kid.