After I say nothing scares me, it could sound like I’m projecting a macho angle about horror. However what I actually imply is, nothing scares me. Once you don’t have a monster in sizzling pursuit, or some tangible focus for concern, your creativeness can actually run wild. Properly, nothing is after you in Swimming pools, and that’s what retains me on edge the complete time. 

Swimming pools is a recreation closely impressed by The Backrooms and different examples of liminal horror. Assume deserted areas, eerily sterile structure, and facets of inside design that both really feel out-of-place or coldly nostalgic. The Backrooms itself began as an idea and a creepypasta, and as these tales are likely to do, it rapidly took on a lifetime of its personal. There’s no scarcity of indie video games which have taken inspiration from it, however you too can simply watch Kane Parsons’ 2022 discovered footage quick on YouTube if you wish to get the gist in a couple of minutes. 

Swimming pools takes the isolating and disorienting thought of liminal horror and distills it right into a small handful of maze-like ranges with a low-key mixture of analog horror aesthetics. All the things needed for a jump-scare-filled trip is current and accounted for, however Swimming pools opts to invoke a unique kind of concern. As an alternative of cultivating a temper of eerie quiet solely to sometimes interrupt it with audio-visual freak-outs or the sudden look of an unstoppable bogeyman, Swimming pools is content material to let the participant wallow in its environment.

That environment is a stifling one which takes the ostensibly secure and sanitary veneer of a public pool and expands it to an absurd diploma. These aren’t decrepit, deserted swimming pools with cracked tiles and cloudy, septic waste instead of chlorinated water. They seem like a soul has by no means stepped foot on their pristine porcelain facades. They is likely to be welcoming in another context, however there’s one thing off about them. It’s not simply that they’re fully empty; they’re additionally sprawling in ways in which don’t instantly make sense. Tube slides twist and switch from one room to the following. A diving board peeks out throughout a yawning chasm, its maw as black because the night time. Oh yeah, and there are large rubber duckies floating round. I swear that’s not a bounce scare, however I wouldn’t fault anybody for leaping.  

As you wade by way of waist-deep water, climb pool ladders polished to perfection, and switch with nice trepidation down one more interconnected hall, dread begins to reveal its enamel. For probably the most half, all you’ll be able to hear as you discover these twists and turns are the sounds of your toes plodding alongside, the sloshing of pool water, and your personal heavy respiration after saying screw it and jogging down one other all-too acquainted hallway. You’ll additionally hear the occasional legitimately spooky sound. Guttural growls echo out from an indeterminate location. A tender musical jingle chimes to life and all you are able to do is surprise the place it’s coming from, what triggered it, and what all of it means, if something.

There’s no feeling that Swimming pools ever aimed to drag the chair out from below these on the lookout for a extra conventional horror recreation. The builders at Tensori even go as far as to promote it as an expertise by which you simply “discover, admire, and hear.” They go on to reiterate that there are “no monsters chasing you” on this self-described “strolling simulator.” I learn that description earlier than enjoying, so I had a metaphysical blanket draped over me to consistently reassure me that nothing was on the market. My creativeness didn’t see it that means, although. You may inform me there aren’t any monsters ready at nighttime, and you may present me in stark element that I’m on their lonesome on this planet. That solely serves to exacerbate any fears inherent to the surreal setting. 

I additionally discover it actually irritating to get misplaced, and that’s not a bug in Swimming pools, it’s a function. It’s very straightforward to get circled, even with such standout landmarks as “big-ass slide” and “oddly menacing rubber duck” to function your personal private breadcrumbs alongside the way in which. Since I additionally knew that may come into play earlier than booting it up, I met Swimming pools by itself phrases and turned that frustration into one other side of concern.

Swimming pools isn’t one thing that’s going to have you ever quaking in your boots, or sweating it out whereas cowering in a nook. It is going to, nevertheless, present ample house to your thoughts to work time beyond regulation and play just a few tips on you. At instances it may be enjoyable, and at others it may be claustrophobic. Most of all, although, I discovered it isolating. It’s like waking up slightly disoriented after a brief nap solely to seek out everybody else has blinked out of existence. Taking your headphones off is like developing for air, and that’s all I can actually ask for from a delicate horror expertise like this.