It’s often said that horror is more effective when we don’t actually see the monster. Which is fine, a valid statement, even – but what if the monster is the haunting spectre of verruca socks and discarded plasters?
By what criterion do we deem horror to be psychological? Resident Evil is, for the most part, more than happy to stay in the realm of the physiological – to dampen your palms or to turn your stomach. You make it to the end and you feel wiped and lifted, the horror flushed from your system. Silent Hill, on the other hand, is only happy when it’s unseating your general sense of wellbeing; its monsters, scarfed in a milky fog, are eager to crunch you into gristle, but only if it gives you food for thought, something difficult to chew on in the daylight. Maybe the purest claim belongs to games that feature no fiends at all, that menace your mental peace with nothing more than the noise of air and the absence of other people.
All credit to Pools, then, which unfolds in first person and has you explore a series of public swimming baths. The public is, of course, nowhere to be found. This is one of those games about liminal spaces – the areas between destinations, purpose-built to cater for moments without purpose. Waiting rooms, baggage carousels, bus stops. The most stirring example of the genre is Islands: Non-Places, which presented these scenes, clouded with soft colour, and had you probe the environment and bask in the sounds of birdsong and rain. You could practically fall asleep to it, so pleasant and drifting was its spell. You would not, however, want to fall asleep in the company of Pools. The nightmares would leak in like the smell of chlorine.
The developer, Finnish studio Tensori, dwells on not just the pools but the passages between: railings and ladders of brushed metal, white-tiled corridors, coloured slides. Then, of course, there is the water, the slosh and slap of which echoes on the soundtrack. At a distance, it looks black; draw close, and you see it thin to a clear, chemical blue. The aim of each mazy level is simply to make it to the end, though doing so with your mood unmoored proves a challenge. The reason these non-places so easily trouble us is that they are only microwaved into mild placehood by the bustle – even the frustration – of other souls. Suck away that presence, and you’re left with something like a pre-ruin, a structure frozen at the exact moment of abandonment. Tensori stylistically rigs the game, as it were, nudging us gently toward horror with a film-grain effect, as if the camera were coated in a layer of bubble wrap.
The implication is not quite that we are in the queasy found-footage genre. Games such as Blair Witch and Outlast, have you peer through the winged panel of a camcorder, and their frights are battery-powered: reliant on the hot gleam of night vision to heighten the mania of faces, or the lurch and crackle of static to mist your vision. Their methods, as such, tend to run out of juice. Rather, Pools belongs to the same category as those YouTube videos in which people poke around vacant buildings – shopping malls, hospitals, even sites in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. (Or to give it its official, translated title, the “Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation.” Quite so.) Indeed, some of the structures here warp well beyond belief and take on a Soviet air. At one point, you wander into a dark silo, with a diving board levered out above an abyss.
Now and then, the surrealism curdles into cliché. I could have done without the slabs of flooring that slide into place underfoot, like one of those dosed-up dream sequences that Ubisoft likes to wheel out in Far Cry, when in need of a narrative bump – as though a choppy storyline could be snorted and blitzed into cohesion. As for the sheep that turns up, sprawled on a sofa and staring beadily, count on that to send you into a snooze. And I hereby propose a ban on the use of mannequins in horror. They were last considered freaky around 2005, when you crept through empty department stores in Condemned: Criminal Origins; now their effect has numbed into an easy shorthand, whenever a game wants to strike a quick uncanny pose.
Most of Pools is strong enough without these flourishes. It spends its run time – six stages in all, between ten and twenty minutes each – keeping you off-kilter with geometry, all bad angles and gravity-bending slopes, halls with ceilings as high as hangars. When was the last time a game’s architecture made you stop to think, or to catch your balance? There are no monsters here (though, in one freaky section, I stared down a jumbo rubber duck) but you almost wish there were; if something did lope out of the shadows and squelch toward you, it would provide an answer or an end. Instead, you’re left with the lingering prickle of discomfort, as you plash through another chamber, and the water laps at the lens. Spookier still is the notion that something like this spills into and spikes the mainstream. If Capcom or Bloober Team decide to offer stretches of eerie nothing, instead of all the ghouls, then we’re really in trouble. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the slaughter.
Game: Pools
Platform: PC
Developer: Tensori
Publisher: Tensori
Release Date: April 26, 2024
