Games Set in Nowhere
The Backrooms helped inspire this video game. Consider it and other games that take players into eerie landscapes, abandoned buildings, and foggy nowheres—such as Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable (2013). What aspects of liminal spaces make them effective settings for these games?
Most video games give you a quest, a story, a goal. Pools gives you none of that — just empty, water-flooded rooms that echo as you wade through them, growing stranger the deeper you go. Inspired by The Backrooms, it and games like The Stanley Parable drop you into eerie, purposeless spaces and let the unease do the work.
Key concepts
- The Liminal Game Space
- A game world built from in-between places — empty pools, endless corridors, foggy voids — where the setting itself, not enemies or plot, creates the experience.
- Atmosphere Over Action
- With no interface, dialogue, or music, just footsteps and echoes, Pools makes the space feel real and the tension constant.
- Exploration And The Unknown
- With no map or goal, every empty room is a small mystery, and the not-knowing is exactly what pulls the player forward.
- Subverting Expectations
- The Stanley Parable takes the in-between of an empty office and breaks every rule of how games 'should' work — no winning, contradictory narration — leaving the player as unmoored as the setting.
What to know
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Liminal spaces make great game settings because they run on mystery: an empty, purposeless place makes you ask 'where am I and what's next?' — the not-knowing that defines liminality is exactly the engine of exploration a game needs.
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