Its got rubber duckies!

Yes. Get it. It's very relaxing and at the same time unnerving. Someone needs to start a petition to tear down sports stadium and replace them with poolrooms.

Game Review: Pools

Pools isn’t a game. It’s a descent—a slow, disorienting slip into a liminal purgatory where reality frays at the edges and something unseen watches from the cracks. It doesn’t scare you with monsters or sudden shocks. Instead, it seeps into your mind like cold water, making you question what’s real and what’s imagined. Every quiet corridor, every distant sound, every ripple in the water feels wrong in a way you can’t explain—and you won’t want to stay, but you’ll be too afraid to leave.

The game begins with silence. A vast expanse of empty pools stretches out before you. The water is still, glassy, and ankle-deep, yet it chills you to the core. The white tile walls rise high, clean and clinical, glowing faintly under fluorescent lights that buzz faintly overhead. There’s no music, no sense of direction—only you and the drip-drip-drip of water echoing somewhere deep in the complex. At first, you feel alone. But then you begin to notice… small things. A splash far off in the distance. A faint ripple that spreads toward you before disappearing, like something brushing against the water. Your footsteps sound too loud, like you’re intruding on a space you were never meant to enter. You’ll stop walking, but the faint sloshing of water continues just a little too long. It’s as if something has been following you… but it’s just out of sight.

At first, the pools seem simple—repeating, uniform rooms that stretch on endlessly. But the longer you walk, the more you notice the cracks in reality. Ladders ascend impossibly into ceilings where there should be none, shaking as if someone is climbing up and out of view. Tiles on the walls are smeared with strange symbols—symbols you don’t understand, and yet, you feel them staring back at you. Don’t stop moving. Keep your head down. It knows. They’re warnings, you think, or maybe confessions—left behind by others who walked these halls before you. Others who never found the way out.

The whispers come next. You won’t remember exactly when they start. Maybe you hear them faintly, buried in the drips of water and your own echoing footsteps. They’re soft, barely audible—the distant hum of voices that shouldn’t be there. You’ll stop and listen, straining to understand, and they’ll stop, too—like they know you’re listening. You’ll press on, but the whispers return, now closer, louder, and distinct: Come this way… Don’t look back… You’re not alone.

That’s when you begin to see it—the cracks. The water isn’t still anymore; it ripples, though you haven’t moved. At the corner of your vision, a shadow pulls itself along the surface of the water—gliding silently before disappearing when you turn your head. Sometimes, you see reflections. But when you stop to look, the figure staring back at you isn’t you. It’s too tall. It’s hunched, its limbs too long, its face a blur of darkness. It lingers for a second, a breathless eternity, and then it’s gone—replaced by your own pale, terrified expression.

The rooms begin to twist. Corridors loop back on themselves, doors open into spaces you’ve already walked through, and the ceilings stretch higher into a void where the light doesn’t reach. The pools change, too. Some are shallow—safe—while others yawn into black depths, so deep the water seems to pull at you as you walk. You think you hear something moving beneath the surface, something vast and silent, waiting. Your legs grow heavy. The water grips your ankles tighter. When you finally step out, you’ll swear something touched your skin, something cold and skeletal that brushed past you on its way to the surface.

And then there are the holes. Perfect circles, cut into the pristine white tiles of the floor. They’re subtle at first—small enough to step around, dark enough to avoid. But they get bigger. Deeper. And when you stare into one, you’ll see it—a pair of hands reaching up from the void below. They move so fast—groping violently at the air before retreating with unnatural precision. You’ll hear something breathing down there, something alive. Sometimes, if you stand too close, you’ll hear your name. You’ll swear you feel the pull of fingers brushing against your shoes, trying to drag you down.

The worst moments, though, are the tunnels. They are narrow, suffocating passageways where the water darkens, the air grows cold, and the light disappears entirely. You won’t want to go in—everything inside you will scream not to—but you won’t have a choice. The whispers will guide you forward, urging you deeper into the dark. Your footsteps will echo strangely, as if the space is far larger than it appears. And then you’ll hear it—wet dragging sounds behind you. Faint at first. Distant. But they grow louder, faster, closer. You’ll turn back, holding your breath, but there’s nothing there… just the sound of something breathing.

The silence in Pools is alive. It’s oppressive, tangible—a presence pressing against you, crawling under your skin, clawing at your sanity. You’ll feel watched, but you’ll never see who’s watching. And when you finally reach the last room, when the water turns pitch black and the air grows so still you can’t breathe, you’ll know it’s there. Watching. Waiting. The screen fades to black, and you’ll hear it—a whisper so close it’s like someone is right behind you. You were never alone.

When you turn off the game, the feeling doesn’t go away. The silence lingers. The dark corners of your room feel deeper. You’ll hear faint drips of water where there are none. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night, your skin clammy, convinced you heard footsteps outside your door. You’ll check the mirrors twice, searching for something that isn’t you staring back. And you’ll wonder—if you ever really left, or if Pools followed you home, waiting for you to play again.

Pools is not a game you play. It’s a nightmare you live. And it doesn’t stop when you turn it off.