You wake up just like before. Maybe you passed out, maybe you fell through reality, or no-clipped as they like to say. But this time it isn’t yellow wallpaper and damp carpet. It’s white tiling, and rooms with oddly shaped pools, steel railings, and slide tubes.
Welcome to POOLS, an extension of The Backrooms, or as the developer says, “Inspired by the Backrooms.” Although, most people know that the pool rooms are just part of the backrooms, much like the crimson forest, and the neighborhood (both of which can be seen in Kane Pixel’s found footage series, along with glimpses of the pool rooms).
With water up to your chest and hoping to find some kind of exit, you’re met with a black corridor, threats unseen. If there even are any.
And that’s one of the things that makes this game so great. There are no enemies, or, I should say, no visible entities hunting you, or chasing you. There’s no Xenomorph in overhead air ducts. There’s no Nemesis waiting to burst through the wall, and there’s no Howler chasing you down to rip you to shreds.
It is essentially a walking simulator. A liminal walking simulator. And that’s what makes it so horrifying. You have only your sight and your hearing. There is no HUD. And throughout, you’ll hear splashes from your own body into the water, your feet tapping against the tiles. You’ll hear scraping in the vents, or the moan of a gaping chasm.
Now, there aren’t any strange entities visibly chasing you, but there is definitely something in the pools with you.
If you remember the old days of the original Playstation, and the first time you popped in the Silent Hill disc, you probably remember the sense of unease. The feeling that something was very wrong about the world around you. And then you were slowly introduced to it.
This is the same thing, without the hot nurse monsters and the undead babies.
The fear is, for the most part, entirely in your own head. The game does such a good job of setting you up to be scared, that it uses your own senses against you. And I haven’t even gotten far enough in the pools to determine whether or not something actually does ever happen. I just know that there is seemingly something going on behind the walls, up every dark hole (especially the ones you can’t access), and behind the air ducts.
You walk around a corner and there’s a ladder sticking out from a corridor higher than you can reach, and then something rips it away from your grasp. There’s a pair of hands on another ladder that’s submerged in the water, and before they vanish, an index finger points behind you.
Pools is a game about psychological terrorism, and I love it.
I could spend hours admiring the architecture, wandering the halls trying my best to ignore the terror. Everything about liminal horror is what I’ve been looking for in the genre for so long, and I would give anything to make an escape to utter solitude and silence, for just a few hours a day.
But this is a title where the horror creeps up on you, very slowly.
Jump scares are cheap, slashers are boring, zombies are overdone.
But emptiness? Wrongness? Now you’ve got me interested.
Around every single corner, you’re expecting something to be there. That’s what you’re used to, that’s what you’ve been taught to look for. And … for the most part, there never is.
Aside from our friend, Ducky. Yes, that’s what I’ll call him. But that’s just the beginning, and there is much more. More than a rubber duck, at least (there are, apparently, more bath time rubber toys with eyes lying around). But I’m almost too terrified by this game, and simultaneously intrigued, and entranced, to advance too far, too quickly.
I could probably keep going on and on about Pools, but I think it’s best you probably grab it and experience it for yourself. Of the games based on (or inspired by) the Backrooms, this is a must-have, and will certainly win an award.
I give this game a 27 out of 5 Novas.
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