Escape the Backrooms: Full Walkthrough & Level Select Guide

You've finished Terror Hotel with a group, a friend joins you three weeks later, and you'd have to start all over again from Level 0? No. Since version 1.0 released on October 23, 2025 on Steam, Escape the Backrooms includes a second mode, The Hub, which acts as a level selector: you relaunch a specific floor, solo or with up to four players, without replaying through the campaign.

The catch is that the name "The Hub" covers two distinct things, unlocked in two different ways. On one side, a mode accessible from the menu. On the other, an actual level — an underground tunnel lined with numbered doors — that you visit during the campaign. This confusion remains the leading cause of "I have no levels unlocked" posts on the Steam forums.

This guide breaks down both systems, the location of the ten doors, and what the difficulty chosen when creating a save permanently locks in. All up to date with patch 1.3.2 from June 15, 2026, the latest update announced by Fancy Games and Secret Mode across all platforms.

The Hub mode: replaying a level you've already finished

When starting a game, you're offered two paths. Story Mode is the campaign: named save files, a difficulty, continuous progression from Level 0 through to the alternate endings. The Hub is the other mode: a list of missions, each corresponding to a level, launched directly from the lobby.

The unlock rule is simple, and it's the one most players miss: a mission appears in the list as soon as you've managed to exit the corresponding level, in any save — including a game hosted by someone else. In practical terms: joining the lobby of a player who's already further along and reaching the exit with them is enough to unlock the floor for your own sessions. Version 1.0 added a mission selection screen on top of this in the lobby: once a mission is completed in The Hub mode, it can be relaunched from a list, without having to go through anything else.

Each completed mission grants XP and raises your player level. Don't count on it for cosmetics, though: all eighteen Wanderer outfits, including colored jumpsuits and seasonal outfits, are all available from the start in the character selection screen. At this stage, XP is nothing more than a progress marker.

The Hub level and its ten doors

The other Hub is a place: a long underground tunnel, completely safe, with no entities or items to pick up, and where sanity doesn't drop. It contains an abandoned M.E.G. outpost and ten metal doors marked with the number of the floor they lead to. The associated achievement, Escape The Hub, is in fact described as "Enter The Hub and power the outpost."

A door only opens if you've found it inside the level it connects to. The Level 9 door unlocks from within Level 9, never from the tunnel. Here are the ten levels involved and where to look.

A tip that saves time: since the Level 1 door sits on the mandatory path, everyone already has it without knowing it.

Saves: what's locked in, what isn't

In multiplayer Story Mode, creating a game is the same as creating a file: you name the save, you choose its difficulty, and that difficulty is set in stone. No menu lets you change it afterward. On PC, the file name gives away the mechanism: the data stored in %localappdata%\EscapeTheBackrooms\Saved\SaveGames follows the pattern MULTIPLAYER_name_difficulty. Some players edit MAINSAVE.sav with an Unreal file editor to rename the difficulty of an ongoing game: this isn't supported by the studio, it's impossible on console, and the slightest syntax error corrupts the file.

In single-player, the question doesn't come up: the campaign is locked to Normal, with no choice available.

Since the May 28, 2026 update, a full autosave feature rounds out the system. An icon signals each trigger, at transitions between levels and at certain respawn points within a floor: that's where the session will resume from. The message displayed at the start of a game is only there to teach you to spot it.

Which difficulty to choose before creating the file

Four difficulties, properly translated in the French client: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Nightmare. The difference mainly comes down to how death and sanity are handled.

• Easy — sanity does not drop and the Hounds move more slowly. A dead player becomes a spectator until the next level; if the whole group falls, it's back to the start of the floor. Associated achievement: “Participation Trophy”.
• Normal — sanity drops, the death rule doesn't change. This is the difficulty forced on solo play. Associated achievement: “Squad”.
• Hard — a single death sends the whole group back to the start of the level, and the Hounds can only be stunned once with the flashlight: after that, you have to hide. Associated achievement: “Group Effort”.
• Nightmare — one death and everyone goes back to the multiplayer lobby, despite the game's message announcing a return to Level 0. Sanity loss is multiplied by 1.5 on the floors concerned. The “Nightmare” achievement requires finishing the game with four players on this setting.

The method that works: keep a Normal save to explore and map out the doors, and create a separate Nightmare save once the group knows the exits by heart. Practice with fewer than four players before the official attempt: fewer people, fewer accidental deaths. Good news, though, for the ultimate ending: the “Successful Escape!” achievement accepts it on any difficulty, so it's absolutely pointless to suffer for it.

Why your levels are still called Lights Out in French

The game is indeed localized into French for the interface and text, with the voice acting remaining in English. But the translation deliberately leaves the floor names in English, and the French Steam achievement descriptions confirm it in black and white: “Trouvez la sortie de Lights Out”, “Trouvez la sortie de Thalassophobia”, “Trouvez la sortie du Terror Hotel”. Habitable Zone, Pipe Dreams, Electrical Station, Abandoned Office, Poolrooms, Run For Your Life!, The End, Cave System, Snackrooms, Grassrooms, Death Slides: none of them has an official French equivalent, and neither does The Hub.

Only the system labels are translated: the difficulties, and achievement titles like “Survivalist” (survive fifteen minutes in Level 0) or “Squad”. So be wary of guides that talk about “Zone habitable” or “Hôtel de la terreur”: these labels don't exist in any menu of the game, and you'll waste time looking for them.

What that means in mid-August 2026

The Hub mode has never been more useful than right now, precisely because of the influx of newcomers. The game arrived on May 28, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Game Pass, then on July 7 on Nintendo Switch 2, with the same amount of content as the PC version and cross-platform matchmaking. In early July, Fancy Games and Secret Mode announced more than three million new players across all platforms combined.

Practical consequence: your friends who just arrived have an empty mission list, while yours is full. There's no point sending them a save file; however, every floor they clear in your session stays unlocked for their own Hub mode. So running a Story Mode campaign with them is both a playthrough and an unlocking session.

On the maintenance side, patch 1.3.2 from June 15 fixed several lobby pain points: a crash after long inactivity in the Hub, a blocker preventing you from joining another lobby after an invite to a full game, and voice chat dropouts. The ping displayed in the lobby list has, however, been temporarily removed, as the studio deemed it inaccurate and a source of confusion. Finally, the game is being featured this week in Steam's Tiny Teams Festival, where it earned the "Tiny Champion" title, and is listed at €7.59 instead of €9.49 for the duration of the event.

The procedure to follow therefore comes down to three steps. Finish a first campaign on Normal by methodically picking up the ten doors along the way, which unlocks both the tunnel and the mission list. Then fill in the missing floors in The Hub mode, for the achievements and for the XP, without ever forcing Level 0 back on anyone. And create, separately, right now, the Hard or Nightmare save file you'll want to finish someday: since the difficulty can no longer be changed afterward, it's the one decision in the game that's best not taken lightly.