It’s 2013 and I find myself in New Orleans covering TechEd North America for Lifehacker. My days were filled with the conference, running between sessions and jotting down as many notes as possible before I’d spend my nights writing a blog post for the next day. Once it finished though we had a couple days to ourselves and so we spent the time exploring the big easy, taking in its sights and trying to recover from the long night we’d spent on bourbon street. It was in that exploration we came across one of America’s numerous strip malls, one that was almost entirely devoid of human presence. As we walked through it I was hit with an eerie wave of nostalgia, like I was seeing the remains of a once great place where many misbegotten youths would’ve spent their days.
I am now told this is what it’s like to experience a liminal space.
So it was with that same weird feeling that I found myself drawn to POOLS, a game set in a bizarre world that is all made of waterpark architecture. All of the things you see in this game are familiar, yet extremely eerie in their construction. There’s no real objective save for exploring the world and trying to find your way through to the exit. Just exploring a space devoid of life would probably be enough for an experimental title like this but they decided to add on a lovely layer of psychological horror there, using everyday objects in very peculiar ways to make you question what kind of reality you’ve managed to stumble into.
Adding to that eerie feeling is the game’s approach to realism with the environments rendered with a heaping of effects to give the surreal world some sense of tangibility. Your footsteps echo off the hard tiled walls. You can hear yourself breathing over the various background noises you’d expect from a public pool. Light bounces off the tiles in just the right way and the entire place is bathed in that slight haze that high humidity always brings. Long story short: it’s creepy, even when you know that there’s no monsters around each corner there’s just something in your brain telling you that there is one.
There are no puzzles to solve, no mechanics to learn. All you need to do is walk from one part to the next, look at whatever takes your interest and then keep on walking. With all the rooms looking vaguely similar though it’s pretty easy to get yourself turned around, something I did multiple times on the first level without even realising it. Later levels seemed better constructed though as I didn’t feel like I was backtracking as much, although honestly given how big some of these levels are I might’ve just forgotten that I’d been to a place by the time I got back around to it.
Whilst the game is short, just over an hour at the pace that I managed to complete it, this doesn’t stop it from feeling repetitive. There’s a lot of asset reuse here and it doesn’t take long for you to find rooms which look like they were worked on only to be cut off before they could be full realised. To be sure I get this is part of the aesthetic, but when a short run game like this starts to feel repetitive after 20 minutes or so you have to ask yourself if somethings where just built for the sake of it. The chapter breaks do make for good points to stop playing the game for a while though so perhaps it’s not worth trying to play this game from start to end.
POOLS then is more about the experiences that came before it than the actual game itself. The second I saw it I was teleported back to New Orleans, that same eerie feeling I had somehow compelling me to give it a go. It’s well crafted, using every tool at their disposal to ensure they capture that liminal space feeling. There’s potential here to make a more poignant experience but cutting down on some of the cruft but I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there who’ll love exploring endless abandoned public pool spaces despite what I think of it. So if, for whatever reason, you find yourself suffering from that same weird nostalgia feeling just by looking at what POOLS have to offer then it’s definitely worth checking out.
Rating: 7.5/10
POOLS is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 82 minutes with 56% of the achievements unlocked.
