With a premise rooted in open exploration rather than solving puzzles or confronting monsters and enemies, Tensori’s POOLS isn’t a game in the conventional sense. It’s important to know this going in, because expectations of having something to “do,” a character to roleplay, and even a story to engage with, will likely lead to disappointment. However, letting go of these expectations, if you even harbor them in the first place, will bring you into a sublime and complex expression of liminal spaces.
Though clearly and respectfully influenced by animators like Jared Pike, Kane Pixels and Matt Studios, whose seminal shorts on YouTube have deservedly drawn attention and praise, Tensori succeeds in offering their own singular vision of the Poolrooms, a subset of the broader Backrooms creepypasta in which environments are defined by pools as you would expect at an aquatics center as well as spaces that are only pools because they’ve been flooded. The result is a stunning work of art, perfect for casual gamers and/or anyone who has yearned for an interactive, rather than passive viewing, experience of the Poolrooms.
The Architectural Wonderland
As the game starts, we are literally dropped into a white-tiled space, where we assume first-person control of an avatar with a camera. (Our perspective throughout the game is through the camera, but the first-person-point-of-view doesn’t draw attention to this.) The controls are simple and elegantly implemented, limited to moving/swimming and looking around. After noting that our point of entry is an inaccessible hole in the ceiling, gameplay continues with navigating the maze of rooms comprising an increasingly large complex of spaces. The first thing to note is how immersive the experience is. Tensori clearly have a solid grasp of architecture and the psychology of space, successfully creating environments that leverage structure, spatial volume, and light to express the tension of liminal spaces that are intelligible (that is, navigable) but without a clear purpose. Some are bright and expansive, others dark and claustrophic, and a few that are mind-bogglingly monumental. Even before we consider the oddities and fun references to Backrooms lore, Tensori’s consistently fascinating architectural design beautifully evokes a range of experiences, from calm to unsettling to WTF. It is, on its own terms, a joy to progress through each chapter and discover new elements and new space typologies as they are delivered with increasing surrealism. Add in outstanding sound design, which foregoes a musical score to focus entirely on sound effects and environmental sounds, and POOLS becomes all the more engaging. From the tapping of our footsteps and mechanical sounds of HVAC systems, to random bits of music and noises that are disturbingly weird and inexplicable, it’s astonishing how well Tensori integrate a sonic experience into the physicality of their environments.
Lost in Liminality
POOLS is no mere building tour, of course, and this is where Tensori’s other strength comes into force: their understanding of liminal spaces. Where I have a quibble with the Backrooms and the many videos on YouTube, however well done, it’s with the loose conception of liminality, which is related to but not identical to the mysterious. To explain what I mean, consider that liminality has more than one aspect. In the physical sense, liminal spaces are transitional spaces. These could be rooms like foyers, where people transition between exteriors and interiors, or thresholds like doorways. The Backrooms are liminal in the sense that they our conceptually outside our lived experience and consist of spaces that seem more algorithmically generated than actually designed. The maze-like environments are much like a sentence in which the grammar and vocabulary are correct, but the word choices don’t add up to anything meaningful. As pots say, kettles garden in orbit, but only when the moon frets in the calendar’s dreams.
It's the conceptual sense of liminality, however, that is to me the most evocative, and here I refer to semantic ambiguity – that is, the unclear meaning of a space (e.g. its intended purpose). Conceptual liminality isn’t just about ambiguity but irresolvable ambiguity, the impossibility to definitely assign any kind of meaning to a space. Just as the physical condition of being in a liminal space implies a perpetual sense of transition, the mental perception of a liminal space implies an inability to understand it in a teleological sense. We simply can’t explain why any given space is how it is. Worse, we can’t even be sure that there is an explanation. It’s precisely the irreconcilable tension between meaning and meaningless that gives liminality its power, particularly in comparison to the mysterious which implies meaning through a definite question even if the answer is out of reach.
With this understanding of liminality in mind, the most successful liminal spaces to me are therefore those spaces that never offer a resolution to our perceptions of environments that don’t make sense in their whole, leaving us at the mercy of whatever fears and wonders our minds can conjure. When someone introduces a monster, however, or starts populating spaces with all manners of entities, the liminality is lost and we are left with the merely mysterious: undeniably weird places whose meaning is fixed on surviving horror even as the origin of that horror is unknown.
POOLS is a beautiful demonstration of this physical and conceptual liminality. And in their world-building, Tensori demonstrate great skill and restraint in when and how new elements are introduced, whether these are incongruous artefacts or adjustments to the laws of physics. This drives their ability to gradually ratchet the suspense throughout the game and, without a narrative framework or monsters to chase us, makes the complex of maze-like environments delightfully resistant to explanation and rational understanding. Even the strangest, most surprising scenes in the game are presented without any means to discern their purpose, adding to an atmosphere that straddles curiosity and dread. If you want a literary comparison, here’s one: the entirety of the complex is rather like Stanislaw Lem’s inscrutable ocean in Solaris, which produces entirely human doppelgangers of people taken from the memories of a space station’s crew. Why the ocean does this is unclear, just as it isn’t clear whether there is any intentionality underlying its actions. And like Lem’s protagonist, we end having to confront the possibility that it may be impossible to figure anything out.
Tensori does push beyond the strict ambiguity of liminality, however, and does so purposefully. This is most overt in Chapter 6, when statues of the kind previously seen in static poses throughout the game begin to act like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Appearing in spaces behind us after we look away, they serve to shepherd us forward by blocking our way back. Even before that, however, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the statues appear to open light panels lining a corridor, staring at us with glowing eyes. (You might want to freeze-frame the moment in the full Walkthrough on YouTube.) Although the statues aren’t exactly chasing us, and they certainly don’t act in any specifically dangerous manner, the unsettling effect nonetheless emphasizes some intentional presence within the complex. Questions about POOLS’ liminality actually occur even earlier than that, as early as Chapter 1, when a detour in a flooded corridor leads to a submerged hole and ladder – and a pair of hands that helpfully point in the right direction to the exit. Although none of these signs of activity by themselves add up to a narrative, let alone an explanation of what the POOLS complex is and what, if any, purpose it might serve, they nevertheless materialize what could otherwise be dismissed as tricks of the mind. We’re not alone in the POOLS, and that’s a different experience than not being able to know whether we are alone or not.
Ambiguity Resolved by … Mystery?
The game’s ending calls everything into question. Sort of. It’s enigmatic to the point that revealing it doesn’t really spoil anything about the game unless you view knowing anything about it as a spoiler. In essence, once we reach the final room, we’re confronted with only one exit: a door held open by a figure of whom we can only see an arm and head in silhouette. Curiously, the game removes our agency as a player and we can only watch as our invisible Explorer-Self sets the camera down on a partially submerged table, leaving only behind the sound of treading water or swimming as the scene continues … on an old TV set on a desk. The final scene is of someone ejecting VHS marked “POOLS” from a VCR.
Personally, I would have been perfectly happy without any of the activity or the meta-ending. POOLS could have concluded as non-narratively as it began, with an exit to the “real” world as abrupt and devoid of explanation as our entry into that first room. The experience Tensori create through architectural and sound design really is just that good on its own. But I have to give them credit for crafting a thought-provoking ending that doesn’t ruin the experience and is even very clever in how it subverts the idea of an ending. Thinking about what the ending means, it’s tempting to start with the fate of our Explorer-Self. Is it a happy ending in which we escape? Alas, we don’t see ourselves leaving through the open door, which actually closes as the scene pulls away to the office TV. Does that mean a tragic or horrifying ending? As we don’t hear any screaming or other sounds of distress, nor has anything in the game threatened us with anything other than being creepy, it’s not clear that anything bad actually happens to our Explorer-Self either. For unexplained reasons, our Explorer-Self simply goes against our natural inclination and sets down the camera instead of heading toward the door. The office scene offers no insights here. It’s tempting, perhaps, to interpret the realization that our game experience was, meta-contextually, the recording of a VHS tape and, from there, find a comparison to the Blair Witch. Although there are no counter-factuals per se to disprove this interpretation, studying the details of the desk scene strongly suggests another interpretation, which is where the subversion of endings comes into play. So what do actually see?
- The ejected VHS tape only says POOLS, the title of the game. There is no date or other informational markings; nothing to me that suggests the tape is footage obtained from a particular time and place.
- In the VHS tapes lying on the desk, while there is one labeled “Found Footage” there is also another labeled Level 188.8, which is a reference to “the Flooded Windows” sublevel in Backrooms lore. Other labels are almost impossible (for me) to read, but one seems to be about tiles, another about building games, and yet another about solving something.
- There are two sketches, an incomplete one of a human torso and, below that, an architectural drawing labeled “entrance,” as well as a human figurine.
- Also on the desk are two books, one on human anatomy and another titled “Architecture: Build Your Dreams.”
- A scene from Chapter 1, the “helping hands” ladder and hole, is presented to us as a painting on the wall. The depiction is more artistic than photorealistic, and displays an artist’s signature.
There’s a final clue – other than the fact that the most significant anomalous artefacts in the game are art-related – that supports the idea that POOLS isn’t ultimately a found footage horror game. Look closely at the TV, and you’ll see it’s branded with the word “IROSNET” – Tensori spelled backward. Could the office be a reflection of the game developers’ studio and, by extension, their creative process? Could questions about the Explorer-Self’s in-game fate be, essentially, beside the point, because the Explorer-Self is merely a user interface illusion? If so, the camera gets sets down simply because the experience has come to an end and it is we, the actual players, who exit the door in our minds as we rejoin the game’s creators in the real world. POOLS is thus, ultimately, interactive performance art. Its meaning comes not from interpretation, but from experience.
Of course, there’s no definitive way to prove whether my interpretation is either “correct” or what Tensori intended or not. It might not appeal to fans of horror games. But it’s that unresolvable uncertainty, and the corresponding opportunity to create our own meaning, that allows the experience of playing POOLS to be truly liminal … and linger long after the credits.
What’s next, then? Should Tensori decide to continue making games in the liminal genre, I would hope they’d resist the temptation to add levels and lore to POOLS as some Steam commenters suggest. The game offers a complete experience, and there are possible development directions that wouldn’t risk its meticulously crafted. After all, the psychology of space, and the experience of solitude, is far richer than terror. After producing a game with a bias toward psychological horror, I’d see an opportunity to further subvert the Backrooms genre with a game biased toward kindness: what could a compassionate liminal environment look like? I’m not Tensori, though, so ultimately that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the future holds, POOLS stands as a magnificent achievement on its own. It certainly can, and should, be revisited to soak in the many different environments, catch previously unnoticed details, and admire the work of art that it is.
Get the game here.
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