POOLS Review

POOLS scared the fuck out of me. Which, if I were to describe to you in plain terms the idea of the game, you’d look at me cockeyed. Sifting through several found-footage tapes, you explore a series of escalating huge environments all vaguely themed around…pools. Played from a first-person perspective with almost no traditional means of interactivity, POOLS simply drops you into a space and expects you to find your way to the exit. Rinse the chlorine, and repeat.

If you have any sort of proximity to internet horror culture there are a few red flags in there, of course, the found footage being the least of your concerns. POOLS is an expertly crafted riff on the booming liminal space, “backrooms” concept, loosely understood as an endlessly shifting collection of simple spaces that are haunted in some way or another. In some backrooms, you might find sickening yellow wallpaper and stalkers who pursue you relentlessly. In others, a kind of Nuketown redux sprawls in an unnerving way, the façade of normalcy compacted by the knowledge you are still somewhere in the backrooms.

It’s a mind game and one played brilliantly by those who choose to pick it up, lifting elements of primal human fears and smashing them together with a particular sense of modern unease and existential dread. There are countless videos and essays on this, and I’m not well-versed enough beyond my late-night binges of IGP’s content, but POOLS hit me like a truck regardless. Developed and published by Tensori, though it’s proudly inspired by the Poolrooms idea conceived elsewhere in this tapestry of fan creations and internet lore.

It is an outright horror experience but almost entirely eschews all the genre trappings we’ve come to expect, especially in the indie space. There is no dialogue or explicit narrative work, no ominous score, no journals, no stalkers, and perhaps most impressively, no jump scares. POOLS is so confident in its setting and tone that it leaves the majority of its horror up to the player– what you take with you to these vast, empty corridors and rooms is what you get back out.

The game takes the Poolrooms concept to its furthest possible ends because of this and manages to conjure striking, unsettling imagery and spaces that (mostly) feel in lockstep with its aesthetics and visual language. There is a small stretch toward the game’s backend in which it gives into what can best be described as backrooms fan service, dropping the intricate and considered spaces for more recognisable ones, but these moments are brief and ultimately used to reinforce the overarching tonal work done by the rest of the game.

Regardless, POOLS is a frankly jaw-dropping visual and audio experience. The simplicity of its first few “levels” (the game is broken down into several tapes to watch/play) is so unnerving for its raw fidelity, with everything in these pool rooms shimmering, gleaming, and reflecting with uncanny realism. Later levels, which delve into more abject conceptual imagery and horror, are treated with the same care and fidelity, melding the mundane porcelain walkways with towering, tortured faces and unsettling object placement.

Without any means of traditional scares, POOLS is just as reliant on its ambient sound design as its pristine visuals. The pool rooms are, naturally, loaded with background noise, from the sloshing and dripping of water to the whispering of ventilation shafts and the ever-present plodding and echoing of every move the player makes. You’re even invited to sit in random lawn chairs to focus the sound so you can better hear whatever is making that strange sound in the walls around you.

Final Thoughts

It is a masterclass in vibes, the kind of immersive experience games with a small country’s worth of budgets can only ever try to clumsily emulate. That is of course if you’re open to what POOLS is trying to do, no doubt some will find its lack of explicit systems or goals frustrating or outright boring. Fortunately, I’m a sicko and this kind of slow-burn, ambient horror is exactly what I want from interactive experiences. As I began to piece together my understanding of events in the game through stray imagery and implications, jumping at shadows and straining my ears for an attack that never came, I realised I had drowned somewhere along the way in POOLS.