POOLS review

 

The easiest way to sum up POOLS is to say that the less I played of it, the better it was. While it never devolved into something I would necessarily call a "bad" game, this first-person experience about navigating surreal and eerie environments has a hard time varying its payoffs and progressing its premise to create much meaning.

As a result, the game ends up feeling kind of repetitive and empty, despite the fact that there's some clear--though inscrutable--tale being told.

Water wading

POOLS is a wordless game that just dumps you as a player character into a large complex with white tile floors, walls, and ceilings, and--as its name suggests--there's an awful lot of water pooling all over the place. Some sections of this... building(?) read as fairly standard pool rooms, but there are also gymnasium sized caverns of ankle high water, giant empty rooms with endlessly deep pits filled with water, water slides that weave through an impossible amount of rooms, and more.

The point of all this, it seems, is to unsettle you. These spaces are uncanny. You are alone. It's dead quiet but for the sound of your movements. And then, you start seeing things... or are you? Was a ladder there before? Did that statue move? Was the door closed, or did you see it being closed just as you turned the corner?

POOLS pulls this trick over and over again, and - to its credit - it definitely unsettles! I did not like being in these spaces and wanted to find a way through and out as fast as possible.

Shallow shock

The further you get into POOLS, the environments get stranger. The pool aesthetics may warp into something else, and you may start to see more intentionally creepy furnishings or layouts, but beyond that the game really sticks to being a one trick pony.

These environments have a sort of labyrinth-like structure, and you just have to get through them. The only obstacles in your way being the walls you're seemingly encased in.

When I first saw anything about this game, it was in a Reddit post where someone described it as a "chill game where there's definitely no monsters," and I couldn't tell if they were kidding or not. POOLS definitely seems like the kind of game that should have some kind of jump-scare or boogey-man come out and get you. Or, you know, have some kind of narrative that eventually at least suggests what these places are about.

But no, that never really does happen. There are some "reveals" toward the end but they end up generating more questions than answers, and all but maybe one of them do not seem geared toward capitalizing on the tension of being in these spaces.

Empty pool

To its credit, POOLS effectively creates bizarre, byzantine structures that are somewhat interesting to traverse despite its lack of puzzles or other traditional traversal gameplay elements. It also looks really sharp on iOS, but I guess that has a lot to do with most of the rooms being fully enclosed spaces of mostly a single texture.

These qualities don't really salvage the experience, though. I was my most unsettled and tense in the opening minutes of POOLS, and it did not take more than the first level to start asking if there was going to be something else that happens.

To be perhaps a little unfair, I discovered that the answer is essentially no. This is to say that there are a few key things that gesture at some reveal or storytelling, but they are so free of context and light on information to feel almost random or arbitrary. Also, when I say "a few" I mean like literally three and they all happen after you are well over halfway through a game where otherwise you're just running around.

The bottom line

I want to like POOLS in the sense that there very much seems like a way to capitalize on its eerie environments and tension-building solitude, but this finished product squanders a lot of that potential.

I was certainly curious enough by what it was offering to see it through to the end, but by the time credits rolled I kind of felt like I had been strung along by a series of faint glimmers that never coalesced into something I could parse. Maybe this is a deficiency of mine as a player.

Maybe I didn't look hard enough or understand some undercurrent of environmental storytelling. I think it is entirely plausible that POOLS is operating at some level that just can't hang with, though I'm not sure it's all that probable.