Poolcore

 

Title: Poolcore
Links: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3806552123, https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3806553078
Author: 咸鱼打碟, Rememorize
Survivors: L4D1
Notes: This is a campaign based on the game Pools by Tensori.

Poolcore is a custom campaign that was released on September 22, 2026 and made by two friends in China inspired by the game Pools, which is a walking simulator through liminal pool rooms. The description of this campaign says that it took over 1000 hours to make and I believe it, as there is a lot of polish to these maps. I suspect this is going to become very popular this year as the Backrooms theme is still popular amongst gamers of the younger generation. I have never played Pools but just by looking at their Store page I can immediately see the similarities, as this looks like it could even be a one-to-one adaptation of that game.

In playing a Backrooms (or Poolrooms) style map, the campaign is going to have you go through massive, nondescript, empty, repetitive and often monochromatic rooms. And as such, your experience and ultimately your enjoyment is going to be based on how well these types of rooms inspire your fascination and facilitate good gameplay. Since this is based on going through many, many rooms flooded with water, I suggest that you go get yourself a script that disables water slowdown. I play with one by default so I don't know if the water here slows you down, but if it does, it invites the experience to be quite the slog, just based on how much water there is and how much it slows down the pace.

The campaign is five maps long and I was surprised to see that the campaign does kind of progress as it goes along. The early maps are the simplest, with lots of medium and large sized open rooms. Unfortunately the gameplay loop for these first two maps can kind of be summed up in the above picture. You'll round a corner and see about 20-30 common infected milling about in a group, you kill them, and then deal with any special infected that come at you down a hallway straight ahead. Almost every room in the first two maps feels this way. You're either going down halls with little to no infected, or it's the same, bunched up group of commons minding their own business and then attack you as soon as you blast them with a shotgun or assault rifle.

This monotony is occasionally broken up by a tank, which typically happens once per map. I found these tank fights to be pretty simple if there's a lot of space. Even if it's in water and you can't light it on fire, there's usually a way to just back up and give yourself and anyone else with you enough room to fight it. There can also be witches, although these ones are wandering witches, which are much easier to fight than sitting ones. 

The first map concludes with a gauntlet that easily showed the way with many orange arrows on the walls, thankfully making it difficult to lose your way. The way it ends was bit of a surprise: you jump off a diving board into a pit. I didn't have game instructor messages on, so I have no idea if this is told to the player in a message. The campaign's description tells the player that game instructor messages are mandatory and I highly recommend you to keep them enabled, for reasons like this and more that come later.

The second map was where I found myself asking if this was going to be more of the same as the first map, and unfortunately, it is. While there are nice views of different rooms at times, it mostly still boils down to the same, repetitive combat loop. Also, I got to wondering why there was a bright white sheen to so many of the walls? It gets a little distracting when you see bright white lines, almost like scanlines, on the walls from a distance.

For the most part this second map really is a lot of rectangular hallways and pool rooms, with some different set dressing here and there like water slides. However, to its credit it does change up the texturing somewhat near the end of this map and begins to get into a bit of a more abstract layout that isn't all just flat rooms pool rooms. This is a glimpse of what's to come later. There's also a weeping angel in this map...this is another omen of what's to come later.

The third map is really where the campaign feels like it's coming into its own. The room in the above image is the exact time where it started to feel to me like more of an artistic map. I suppose the sculpted heads makes it feel a bit like a museum. I have no idea if this is represented in the actual Pools game or if this is totally original. However, I really started to like this campaign a lot more once verticality was included. 

There is a really neat effect where it looks like you're going to walk right into a wall but before it happens, you instead see a doorway into a new room that actually has an open ceiling, revealing a bright blue sky. The skyboxes in this map are just great. I haven't seen them in other games, to my recollection, and they fit very nicely with the white tile pool aesthetic. The open air rooms make it feel a bit different, while in reality maybe they actually are very similar to other pillar rooms.

There's another sort of similar fake-out doorway a bit later on, then you pass through some massive chambers and hear a church bell ring as you go past some statues. Towards the end of the map, you pass into a dark void and see a brightly lit door in front of you. When you open it, well, I won't spoil the surprise, but I will say that it was very surprising to me, it looked awesome, and was probably my favorite part of the map. I recommend you play it and see it for yourself. The map ends not too long after that. It was a very enjoyable way to end the map.

I had more mixed feelings about the fourth map. There are more props here and there but we're going back into the poolrooms, and oftentimes the rooms are pretty dark, since the texturing uses dark blue and green tiles. Some rooms hold views out to the sky, while some are more like the first and second maps, so we're kind of back into that slog. Not that zombie killing is boring, but when the rooms are all fairly rectangular and flat, with rooms and hallways only having one way in and one way out, plus you really don't want to jump into pools if you don't have to as there's no advantage to it, well it gets bit samey. Hold Mouse 1 down with a melee weapon and occasionally switch to your primary to kill specials, that's it. The same thing happens in gauntlets to maps like Defense Line.

Thankfully this map breaks this up by having a cool pool tube segment. The effect is neat and even without Game Instructor messages, I found it very clear about what you're supposed to. Hold forward as you go through because this isn't Portal or Portal 2, you could get stuck if you stop moving. 

Now, later in this map is where I started to have some grievances. I suppose it probably tells you in the Game Instructor messages, but once the texturing changes from pools to, erm, I guess something from like The Stanley Parable, you'll end up getting chased by the weeping angel that appeared in an earlier map. It was hard for me to tell exactly what it was doing, since it seemed to just pop up on top of a bot. The issue is that when playing with bots, they'll be crowded around each other and all take damage, then they'll try to get each other up and then keep taking damage. I read one comment saying that the angel should deal more damage and Hell no, that would be even worse. Basically it would mean that doing this in single-player would essentially mean the bots are forced to die. 

Another grievance I had was that later on in this map, you'll find an extremely long and repetitive staircase that just takes forever to go down. I wasn't sure if I could just drop to the bottom and survive, but I didn't risk it and ended up just going down floor by floor, which felt pointlessly redundant. Well, at least that sequence opened up to riding a waterslide down into a large arena room, that should instantly make you think "holdout area." And yes, thankfully by this point the weeping bitch angel has stopped chasing you.

So the fourth map ends with, in my opinion, the first somewhat challenging section of the campaign, a holdout in this room. You have to light a fire to burn down a barricade in this large, open area with a circular pedestal in the center. Hordes are called of course, and special infected spawn pretty quickly. Plus they usually get the drop on you because they tend to fall from above. There are ample supplies here so it's not difficult if you use them, only if you are really stingy like I was. But my question is, how do you light the barricade on fire if you don't have a molotov? I get that the area itself provides you with at least two, I believe, but what happens if you waste them? There is a huge mass of mannequins in the way and I don't believe you can shoot the gas cans through them. 

The fifth map, which is the finale map, begins in a somewhat odd way. It looks to me like you can choose one of two paths to go, although I chose the path on the left (with the yellow tile) rather than the path on the right. There is a very nicely designed room along here which is like an M.C. Escher painting. Unfortunately this space doesn't seem to be able to be traversed by the survivors. It was still nice to look at, nonetheless.

The finale area is a very big room with sculpted heads and some bizarre, abstract geometry. The area is somewhat deceptive as it looks like you should hold out right by the ammo, and I suppose that is probably the best area, in theory. The only issue is the special infected spawn rate is quite high and they can approach you quickly from there. Notably, spitters are especially deadly here. I tried a different area up some stairs to give myself and the bots a little bit of extra time to try and take out the specials, but really that's not good either because a jockey can make someone fall off and a charger can split up the group in a bad way and cause a lot of damage. I just sort of ended up staying on the ground floor and near the ammo as it seemed the most practical.

As I expected, the first wave ends with a single tank and the second wave ends with two tanks. I'm glad to see more campaigns doing this now, as one tank at the end of each wave is too easy. It seems like this is going to be the new standard. It's much better balanced and feels like a good progression through the finale as well. 

However, here's where I had my biggest issue with this campaign: the problem of where the fuck do you go once you kill the tanks. I heard something happen and the bots got whisked away on their own accord to some other place in the map. I didn't have a clue as to what opened, so I actually decided to climb the weird abstract scaffolding to see if the exit was there. It wasn't, so I had to go back down. The weeping bitch came back and seemed to block off an entrance, which I think may have done damage. The bots were totally useless in their own right and Bill ended up clinging to some ledge and Francis ended up dying. By the way, this all happened in some other room that they decided to teleport to.

It was very annoying and extremely frustrating to be so close to the end and not know where the fuck to go. The issue is that you would think that the rescue vehicle would maybe be up across the scaffolding, or maybe something would bust through a wall to pick you up, or maybe one of the head sculptures would act as an elevator and lift you out of the area. But then I remembered that one of the tanks came from a particular direction and I decided to check it out, and that turned out to be the right the way to go (as seen in the above picture).

Sadly there's not a lot of respite and you'll likely need to make use of at least one bile jar to continue onward. The infected still spawn fast and furious, and if you're playing with bots, you'll likely be low on healing supplies. This ending quasi-gauntlet bit took me a bit by surprise. Think of it a little like the endings of Questionable Ethics or Complex Course, though not nearly as bad. At one point I even thought I might be going the wrong way entirely, and that I was instead going the other direction that I would have taken if I had chose the other path at the start of the map. A single orange arrow would have helped this whole thing. 

Once you do make it out, you'll reach a heavenly area where the infected stop spawning. You'll cross over the threshold and reach the end. What exactly is at the end? You'll just have to play it to find out!

Poolcore is really quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, there are a lot of cool elements like the abstract geometry and beautiful artistic areas. For the most part the events are balanced, and while there could be more events to break up the constant forward motion, what's already here is entertaining enough. Being able to look out over different rooms and get some nice views is a plus. On the other hand, a lot of the campaign is comprised of mostly the same-looking tiled pool rooms. The constant forward motion means it's primarily linear. This is broken up at one point by a short maze in the second map, but since the walls were all tiled the same, I didn't find this fun. In almost all other cases, you'll usually round a corner and see basically the same group of common infected milling about to themselves, really not posing much threat to you at all. Special infected usually have only one way to get at you: directly ahead. In terms of the linearity, I suppose there could technically be some exploration, but if there is, it's very minimal. I don't know if the authors removed the L4D2 water slowdown for this campaign (because I use a script that does that automatically), but if they didn't, a mod to remove that is a must, as trudging slowly through waist-high water for half an hour or more isn't a fun time to me.

Final verdict: If I had to rate this on replayability, I don't think I would necessarily rate it as highly as some people would expect. The Backrooms/Poolrooms aesthetic has never personally appealed to me, and in my opinion the poolrooms in the campaign Anemoia has always seemed like enough of that in L4D2 for me. I never clamored for more. These maps all function properly and only appear to have some problems with bots with respect to the weeping angel that deals damage. Now, I can see myself coming back to this campaign eventually, but not often. It's minimalist and when the campaign isn't showcasing impressive artistic parts, the rooms just end up being monotonous. Too often, so is the gameplay. That's really where I come down on things. I can levy the same criticism at the poolrooms maps in Anemoia, but those are only two maps out of six. Here it's a full-fledged five-map campaign. Admittedly, it's not only going through pool rooms, but there's enough of it to get tired of it quite quickly. I respect the work that the authors have put into this, but if I'm being honest with how much I'd enjoy replaying it, I think I'd have to say I'm coming down accurately by saying it's better than average but not quite reaching the status of a very good campaign. Having a great mixture of different environments, events, side areas, optional tasks, and rooms of different sizes and shapes (plus the inclusion of props in a realistic way) will almost always be more valuable to me in my enjoyment of custom campaigns. To anyone who loves this aesthetic and thinks my criticism is unjustified, I would say just compare this to something like Suicide Blitz 2, SaltHell Park, or Early Days. Those campaigns are borderline masterpieces because their environments are so incredibly detailed and constantly changing while also facilitating amazing gameplay experiences. Large box rooms where infected really don't pose much threat doesn't do much for me, and the repetitive, monochromatic aesthetic isn't going to sway me. That being said, I do recommend you play it at least once, as it has some fun moments, and I think it's going to be popular this year. However, I just don't think it's going to have that much staying power in my own personal list of campaigns that I enjoy.

Rating: 3.8/5.