So I Beat POOLS

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

You remember a while back when I wrote that post on POOLS about how awesome and good I thought the game was? Well, I got to chapter two around that time, and decided to stop playing for a while. Not because the game was bad or anything, but just because it gets under you skin way too easily. Eventually, though, I had to come back, and I had to complete it.

And that I did.

I’m going to spoil a bunch of stuff here, but I’m assuming that’s okay, because Backrooms related games and media are kinda niche, and when it comes to horror, this is especially niche.

Usually, when I tried to play this game, I would do it late at night, in complete silence … for some reason. And that made it pretty hard to work my way through. Don’t even get me started on The Complex: Expedition. Despite its harmless entity (that I know of), I find that game just as terrifying.

It’s all the low humming, the scratches, the howling of dark wind in an endless tunnel.

But I did it.

I pushed through, with my pinky on the shift key, the entire time.

There were freaky moments. Funny moments. And sometimes, awe-inspiring moments.

And then it came to an end, with the silent protagonist setting their camera down upon a table, mannequins encroaching upon you from one of two paths behind you, and another arm holding a door open. But then the view cuts to a recording, the door shuts, and whoever’s viewing the tape of your actions hits the stop button, and credits roll.

Pretty confusing, right?

I don’t think so.

Throughout POOLS, there is a lot of imagery. It’s, of course, based on the Backrooms. And the pool rooms are a level known in the liminal maze. Some may also know it as Sublimity (you also get a glimpse of the actual Backrooms in POOLS, along with some other pieces of levels dreamed up by the fandom, such as Eternal Suburbia). The developers though, they only say it’s based on the Backrooms, and I think I understand why we’re making that distinction here. Because it is the backrooms, but it’s also something else.

It’s a work of art.

It’s purgatory.

It’s an allegory for abuse, and the victim of that abuse fighting to escape it, and failing. Fighting in isolation, and trauma, reminded at every turn what they did to you, and when there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and you think you’re finally out of the never-ending spiral, it goes out and disappears. And then the darkness pulls you back in.

Where does this inkling come from, though? Some have already said that they believe this to be an allegory for such things. That this has to be about abuse, or something. I think someone even mentioned they thought it was about CSA, due to some depictions of a child’s drawings on the walls, big black letters scrawled across a picture that reads, “NOTHING,” a single lonely house that appears to you toward the end, and then endless copies of it, and the appearance of very large mannequins screaming, viewing other mannequins in compromising, embarrassing positions, pointing, staring, mouth-agape in horror.

Whatever type of abuse it is, I think this game is definitely telling a story, whether real or fiction, and it’s all right in front of you the whole time.

The innocent rubber ducks sitting around in the water that are somehow terrifying. The pool slides that seem to be in random places that beg to be jumped into, as absurd as that is, while you’re lost in a horrifying complex.

The mixture of innocence, and despair.

Of lightheartedness, and terror.

POOLS takes something that really has no meaning, other than to terrify, and turns it into something that has … a very deep message. Something you have to decode yourself, or not. It’s entirely up to the player, I think. And that’s one more thing that just makes this game so good.

I could be entirely wrong, though, and this could be one of many ways to interpret the game. And that’s okay. Because POOLS isn’t just a game, it’s a work of art, and it asks that you experience it. Nothing more.