Liminal spaces are transitional areas (hallways, backrooms, stairwells, etc.) or♔ places that have long been abandoned and evoke feelings of nostalgia, unsettlingness, or being in a𒅌 dream.
It can be 𓆏somewhere from your daily life, like the stairs in your flat, your office, a school🍎, a hospital, or even your own neighborhood, but otherwise devoid of life. There’s no living beings to be found, and an insidious feeling that something is off.
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Developed by studio Montraluz, is a horror game based on this viral premise. With a VHS f🍸ound-footage visual style, you’ll explore scenarios that might appear normal at first, but with every passing minute you will come to doubt your own conceptions of the ordinary and the everyday.
Dipping Your Toes In The Oniric Waters
Dreampools, one of the two levels available at launch, takes place in what appears to be an in🌞door swimming pool. You arrive from the exit of a blue slide, with no information about who you are, where you are, or what you have to do. Before loading into the level, a short message saying, “Explore the environment only by curiosity. Patience and observation are key,” is your only clue.
Dreamcore will receive three more scenarios over the course of this and the next year. One seems to be a school or a kindergarte𝐆n… I’m not looking forward to that one.
I begin my journey by looking around, seeing walls, roofs, floors, and pillars made of small white squares. There’s a plant in my left corner, while the only path available to me awaits on the right. I play with how far I can see, since my cha𓃲racter seems to be using a camera that lets me zoom in and out. My footsteps sound kind of funny too, as if there’s a delay between the movement and the sound they should emit, while running makes me feel unusually heavy. Some pleasant music is playing somewhere, though I can’t find the source. Nothing feels right.
As I use the💜 first♓ stairway to go down, the first pool is in front of me. It’s not too deep, probably not even reaching my knees. I walk at a slightly slower pace since I can’t sprint while here. Probably not the best spot to run away from something if I’m truly not alone in this strange place.
Out of the water, on the right, I seꦬe an open door with a simple sign on the side: “Notice: Flashlight Needed Here”. I dare to ta♒ke a few steps inside before being engulfed in absolute darkness. “Maybe later,” I say to myself, before turning back and continuing to explore where I came from
Smiling Faces Are (Not) Your Friends
The pleasant music starts to sound lighter. There’s a constant static noise rising, not too loud to be annoying, but high enough to make me think about it all ꦺthe time. E♒very new chamber presents the same white walls with new shapes and sizes, sometimes with more pools, and I’m starting to wonder if the plants I keep seeing are the exact same model each time or if they have variations that I’m unable to perceive.
One door leads to what appears to be a dead-end, with handrails I can’t jump over. As I draw closer and look down, I see a group of giant yellow smiling faces, like the ones you would put on your key rings some decades ago. Sadly, I can’t do anything with them, so I return to where I came from yeꦆt again.
A few minutes later, I realize that a𓄧lmost every room I find has more than one possible path, and each time I take one, I never come back to the previous room. I start wondering just how long this place is, and the subtle concern that the path is changing itself every time I exit a room. Is the game adapting tᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚo my decisions? Is this really somewhere I can escape? Why do I feel like I’m being watched?
Some specific rooms catch my attention. There’s a huge one with holes in an inaccessible wall akin to subterranean tombs. A long staircase leads to a door with a smiling face covering it, which suddenly moves away as I get close. More slides of different colors appear when I least expect them — where are they coming from? The giant 🗹smiling faces start to appear everyw⛦here. Sometimes they look at me directly.
Finally, A (Small) Light At The End Of The Tunnel
I find a flashlight sitting on a table in a slightly illuminated room. It’s pointing to a drawn door on the wall that has a warning sign. Maybe it’s the same door from the beginning? Unfortunately, I have no idea how to return from whence I came, so I keep looking for new paths. But not🦄 before turning on the flashlight and findin𝕴g another smiling face in one corner of the room, previously hidden by the darkness. I let it be and continue onward.
It feels like I’ve been ♏navigating Dreampools for an hour, but I don’t have the courage to check the time. I’m starting to feel like I’m not the🍌re, neither in the game nor in my living room.
At one point, I find what feels like an endless staircase. I start to descend and it takes minutes to reach the other side. This is clearly a new zone, since the previously bright rooms are now submerged 🌳in darkness. My flashlight doesn’t help much either. The plants are gone, now I see perfect concrete spheres pieced together, simulating a marble snowman of sorts.
I s๊tart hearing a new sound, unable to locate a source. It feels like someone is touching a button every few seconds. My head is telling me to stop playing but I keep going. Giant pools, the longest dark corridors so far, and spaces that I can’t fully comprehend at once are my common landscapes. I’m sure that someone or something will pop out and give me the jump scare of my life. It’s all a bit too much until I start walking on a path with multiple flooꦚrs that seem to have a free fall into a pit on the sides, but also a green light showing the exit on a lower floor.
I quickly calculate where I need to go, descending some floors, using ladders, and walking over endless pools of water that I can🐠’t stand anymore. The sound of someone pressing a button is getting closer. I see the exit door, but it leads to another huge room full of water, with a small light at the end. Finally, I see a lift — what the hell is that doing here? — and I escape my aquatic nightmare.
After I see the credits and return to the main menu, I notice there’s another scenario called “Eternal Suburbia”. It 🏅seems to be an area full of small houses in a meadow that reminds me of Windows XP’s classic theme. “Maybe this one isn’t that bad,” I say out loud, before turning off the console and calling it a day.
While it has been studied for ages now, liminal 🍰spaces continue t🍸o be a topic of interest and mystery to many people. There isn’t a definite answer on what makes them so attractive, or why some can find in them a source of relief and tranquility while others, like me, can feel an existential dread while walking through these areas. If you want to see if this is for you, you can try a free demo of Dreamcore on Steam.
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