The Missing Persons Update

Six people walked into the Backrooms before you and never came back. What they carried is still out there, and the LAB now keeps a file on each of them. Voice chat and the whole soundtrack were rebuilt too, your saves are now backed up online, and three free suits are waiting for Halloween.

Everyone you play with needs this update. To get ready for full crossplay with the upcoming PS5 version, sessions and voice chat now run on new systems. Players still on an older version will not see your sessions or hear you, so if a friend cannot find your session, ask them to restart Steam and let the game update.

Missing Persons

• Their Belongings Are Out There • The personal effects of six missing people are hidden across the levels. Your scan pulse picks them out when you get close, and anything you bring home through extraction counts for the whole team. They do not turn up in the tutorial or in Explorer runs.
• A Table for Each of Them • Everything you recover goes on its owner's table in the LAB, alongside the missing persons board. New arrivals are flagged until you go and look, and each table remembers where its owner was last seen.

• Close the File • Bring back the last piece of someone's story and the run ends on a FILE CLOSED screen that tells you what became of them. The file stays stamped in the LAB for good.
• 34 New Achievements • Including one for every file you close and a Master Agent achievement for earning all the others. A few of them wait on content that is not out yet.

Voice Chat and Co-op

• Voice Chat, Rebuilt • The new voice system fixes several issues from the old one. Nearby voices stay clear at talking distance and fade naturally as people walk away. The radio is now its own channel with a proper walkie-talkie crackle, and your mic level balances itself, so there is nothing to tune.
• Talk While You Spectate • Push-to-talk works after you die. The dead can talk to each other and still hear the living, the living never hear the dead, and your radio goes quiet the moment you die.
• Per-Player Volume • Pause > Players lets you set each teammate's voice volume or mute them.
• See Exactly What They See • Dead or joining late, you now watch your teammate's own screen: their bodycam, their zoom, their shakes and scares, all the way to their last moment.
• Photo Wall • The host now rules on photo requests from a simple prompt, a full wall takes down its oldest photo to make room, and you always hear back about yours, even if you were dead or on the end screen.
• Shared Mission Progress • When someone picks up a mission item, the whole team sees it on the M.E.G console with their name and the count so far.
• Multiplayer at a Glance • The deployment terminal now has its own multiplayer card, with Create and Join one press away.
• Failed Joins Explain Themselves • A join that fails now tells you why and what to do: different game version, full session, private session, lost connection and more.
• New Online Backbone • Sessions now run on Epic Online Services through your Steam login, with no extra account to create. Discord Rich Presence also works properly now.

A New Sound

• New Level Music • Most levels have new music written for them. It stays low while you explore, builds when something closes in and breaks into a chase when you are hunted, and each player hears their own situation. Fun plays without it: the party speakers carry the level.
• New Ambience and Footsteps • New ambience that shifts as you move between parts of a level, new footsteps and movement sounds, and a muffled world while you hide in a car.
• New Entity Sounds • The Hound, Skin Stealer, Smiler and Wraith all sound new, and the Skin Stealer screams when it leaps. Every chase is now about as loud whatever is behind you, and a Skin Stealer catch on the other side of the map no longer plays at full volume in your ears.
• Your Helmet Reacts • Your breathing tightens when something hunts you or gets close, and drawing or stowing a tool now makes a sound nearby players hear too.
• Music Slider, Quieter Thunder • Music has its own volume slider, and the Attic thunder is quieter and no longer follows you back to the LAB.

New Gear and Free Halloween Suits

• Holographic Decoy • A new single-use tool in the shop, unlocked after your first promotions. Set down the projector and it shows a human silhouette that pulls nearby entities in, even ones facing away, and keeps them busy until it fades.
• Paint Gun Stencils • Hold the stencil key for a wheel of shapes, then aim, rotate and stamp. The basic paint gun has a handful, the Advanced one has two full pages. Everyone sees them, late joiners included, and freehand paint no longer covers screens, terminals and keypads.

• Three Free Halloween Suits • X-Ray Agent, Maintenance Pumpkin and Forgotten Employee are free in the suit shop, with no rank needed and animated visors.
• Tool Tweaks • The basic paint gun now reaches as far as the multicolour one, placed trackers are bigger and easier to spot, and the PDA has a new tablet model. Its Burnt PDA skin was redone to match: charred, swollen plastic with embers glowing in the cracks.

Saves That Follow You

• Online Save Backup • Your progress and wall photos are now backed up online and restored when you play on another PC or a Steam Deck. Older Steam Cloud copies are picked up too, local backups are kept, and a damaged save is set aside instead of lost.
• Settings That Survive a Reinstall • Settings no longer live in the game folder, so reinstalling keeps them. Volumes, sensitivity, field of view, key bindings, accessibility and interface choices follow you to other machines, while graphics, display and devices stay with each PC.
• Everything You Have Comes With You • Your current save carries over with all its items, and the duplicate Endless entries older versions piled up are merged, keeping your highest money and XP.
• A Short Save Screen • You may see a brief save screen at launch, and a short SAVING pause when you quit while the backup syncs. That is expected.

Interface, Options and Accessibility

• End-of-Run Screens, Reworked • Fewer screens in a clearer order. The first press fast-forwards the reveal, the next one moves on, and promotion and unlocks now share one screen.
• Interface Size • A new slider scales the whole interface up for big screens and couch play. The Steam Deck starts larger and can now be adjusted.
• Reduce Flashing • A new option, off by default, calms flashlight flicker, light glitches in the levels and the Smiler's flash, and keeps the screen from going fully black.
• Comfort Settings • Vibration and Camera Shake each get a slider, Invert X joins Invert Y, and Immersion Mode strips the helmet HUD down to the essentials.
• Fits Smaller Screens • Menus and end-of-run screens now fit small screens and large interface sizes, the training prompt switches to a wider layout when space runs short, and the controller focus is easier to see.
• A Readable Helmet HUD • Helmet text has a dark outline, and visor alerts now queue instead of overwriting each other. Team joins, errors and most notices show up on the visor too.
• Full-Screen LAB Terminals • A PC option opens the LAB terminals full screen, and their buttons and text are much easier to read.
• Fewer Costly Mistakes • On a controller, buying and launching a run take a short hold, while a mouse click still confirms at once. Quit, Leave Session and Abandon ask twice, deleting an Endless protocol asks first, and the pause menu has a Field Guide to re-read your objectives.
• The Terminal Remembers • The deployment terminal keeps the threat tier and zone you last confirmed for the whole session, instead of resetting between rounds.
• Faster Start • The early access and audio cards show only once, one press skips the intro except the photosensitivity warning, the training prompt stops asking after two refusals, and the end-of-run survey shows up far less often.
• Translations • A large pass across all 24 translated languages: untranslated menus and messages, accented capitals, Cyrillic in the terminal font, prices in your local format and no more empty boxes in place of symbols.
• Options Fixes • Changing Player Collision no longer flips Invert Y, setting values no longer vanish on ultrawide screens, and an uncapped frame rate reads Unlimited instead of 0.

Endless

• No More Getting Stuck After Launch • Starting an Endless run could load the Endless LAB on top of the level you deployed to and leave you stuck there. Fixed.
• Threat Climbs in Steps • Threat now climbs through the Classic tiers before rising floor by floor, and the end screen shows the real next value.
• Every Run Starts Fresh • A new run no longer inherits the floor count of your earlier runs in the same session, which could start it at a much higher threat.
• Abandon Means Abandon • Abandoning a run now deletes it instead of leaving it in your run list.
• Co-op Saves Per Player • Teammates no longer overwrite each other's Endless progress. Everyone keeps their own, and older entries are picked back up under your Steam name.
• Back to Classic • Losing an Endless run no longer leaves your next Classic runs without M.E.G supply crates.

Game Feel, Controllers and Performance

• Getting Grabbed Hits Harder • When an entity grabs you, its screen effect is much stronger and lasts the whole kill, the camera now shakes and your flashlight flickers on it, whichever entity it is. Entities that had no screen effect at all now get one.
• Rumble for Blackouts and Attacks • A low rumble runs through blackouts, and you feel a jolt when something grabs you, a thud when you go down and a long rumble on death. It follows your Vibration setting.
• Steam Deck • The trackpads and gyro no longer flip the button prompts to mouse and keyboard.
• Gamepad Menus • The radial wheel picks the slice your stick points at, LAB storage opens on your first item instead of TAKE ALL, the Suburbs keypad types straight from the controller, and DualSense players on PC get the right stick prompts.
• Paradise Runs Smoother • Paradise no longer freezes for about a third of a second as the level starts, and its fog, forest and dead trees cost much less to draw without looking any different. Loading between levels is up to nearly a second shorter too.

The new voice chat resets your microphone choice once, so if you use a specific mic, pick it again in the audio options. Then go find them, and tell me whose file you closed first.

Mat