I got Dreamcore because of the aesthetic promise. I too am affected by the unconscious collective memory of tiled swimming pools as applied to empty cavernous structures. Dreamcore delivers on the aesthetic angle. It opts for a VHS filter by default to fuzzy the edges that would otherwise bring out the sharpy, uncanny Unreal 5 edge that is present in other liminal games like Liminophobia. You go up to the tiles in Dreamcore and they’re scratched up enough that it doesn’t feel like a repeating texture. You can’t make out things in the distance which helps with the ’I shouldn’t go over there’ and the ‘I must’.
The game has problems though and they are mostly to do with my expectations. I was expecting a purely experiential walking sim LSD-style adventure but it’s actually just an enormous maze game. I think the reason it’s a maze is because mazes are easy to design, and you can generate a lot of playtime by making the maze hard to navigate. To be clear, a map, a compass, or inventory would be out of place in this game and collapse the aesthetic but the realisation it’s a maze also does this. Mazes just aren’t all that fun and the pool level is so large and my progress was not saved the first time I quit out that it completely pulled the wind out of a desire to complete it.
There are no enemies but the game does a good job of creating a sense of threat that you constantly doubt whether something is following you or about to happen.
The second level is an endless suburbia which has a day/night cycle and once night arrives the chirpy Americana muzak coming over the loudspeaker drops dead silent. After a long while going in and out of empty houses in a dark endless void an air raid siren plays. Walking is excruciatingly slow but running creates a relatively loud set of footsteps which is disturbing against the silence.
The third level is a bunch of play-space themed mazes and is basically a giant key hunt. I could draw a map but I think this wouldn’t be as fun as it is in games where the maze takes less than an hour to navigate fully. There’s making notes and then there’s full on cartography/blueprintcore. There’s the game’s real name.
It is also, in theory, a great podcast game but then the aesthetic aspect is nullified by listening to whatever. It just reveals that all you’re doing is holding W and doing your best to remember everything that can be taken as a landmark – every room shape and staircase placement. Just overall tedious. And then you search this stuff up for help and realise there are dozens of similar liminal games all over Steam and the bottom drops out.
I’m surprised someone hasn’t actually built real liminal spaces and charged people entry. I would do it. I suppose you’d have to limit access to a few people at a time or make it into a more limited escape room. Would be a better time than all these hedgemazes.