Some people might play Animal Crossing to chill out and get some cozy vibes. Me? I play POOLS. Because there’s nothing more relaxing than finding yourself trapped in an infinite and disorienting series of pool rooms that make next to no logical sense.
Why am I here? Where am I going? That’s what I ask myself every single day in real life, but in POOLS? I know exactly where I’m going, and that’s down this hall right here.
Don’t worry! There aren’t any jumpscares in POOLS. Just the occasional floating rubber duck and chairs. So many chairs.
The backrooms and poolrooms are interesting to me because they evoke claustrophobia in otherwise open spaces, and the rooms in POOLS are no different. They’re familiar and comfy, but also haunting, because there’s no way out. Every light is artificial, you never see the outside, and every turn leads to another strange room or possibly right back where you started.
Some spots are peaceful, even. A few times, I sat in one of those chairs to take in the ambience, making for little quiet moments that offered temporary illusions of normalcy. But there’s never really a sign of the world or living. The few times you do run into anything that moves, like water pouring out of pipes, it gives you that briefest feeling that life could be around the corner, but it never is.
Liminal spaces like in POOLS or the Backrooms are basically the uncanny valley of architecture. These rooms look familiar and like they serve some kind of purpose, but it’s like an alien or an AI (or both) designed each one as a bad copy. They’re rooms it thought a human might find familiar and agreeable. The deeper I went, the more dream logic took over, and those misplaced water slides and chairs really started to make my mind wander.
Near the end, as I stumbled through yet another flooded hallway scattered with submerged chairs, I started thinking about what that really means and how it feels.
Consider the AI or the alien or whatever strange force might have put these rooms together, in the context of the game. It knows a chair is a chair, or at least knows the shape of a chair, but beyond that it doesn’t understand the purpose of it or where it should go. So it’s just…there. The architect was missing context. That got me thinking about real life, too, and how we as humans are the ones who prescribe meaning to things. A chair is a chair, it’s something we designed to sit down on. We put chairs next to tables or in living rooms (or by pools) because we decided that’s where we sit to eat or relax. But they’re still just meaningless shapes.
To an alien or an AI that doesn’t need to sit down or relax, the idea of a chair doesn’t make very much sense.
That’s just how my mind wandered while I played POOLS. Maybe yours would wander differently. The developer, Tensori, describes it as “like an art gallery where you look around and listen to the sounds.” It’s an abstract game, and its meaning is the one you pull from it. I liked it a lot. It’s not a horror game. At most it’s vaguely unnerving, but overall just feels like wandering through a dream for a couple hours.
Would I go insane if trapped in the backrooms, really? Probably. At least in POOLS, there are a handful of accessible water slides to pass the time. A few of those chairs to sit in. Toilets, somehow. It’d be maddening, but at least I could go for a swim now and then.
If you feel like taking that walk yourself, check out the demo for POOLS on itch.io or Steam.
