8AM: The Swimming Pool

In this swimming pool, there are not only more people than when the place is supposedly open, but there is also a guy locked in the bathroom apparently entertaining himself from midnight to 8 AM. At that point, this is less of a paranormal anomaly and more of a medical emergency waiting to happen. The rest has the same problems as the previous chapters. The jumpscares have absolutely nothing to do with the map’s setting or with the events happening inside it. The differences are not scary, not unsettling, and quite often ridiculously hard to notice, usually boiling down to tiny, meaningless changes hidden almost out of spite. Overall, it is a pretty disappointing experience. It is not scary, it is not intriguing, and there does not seem to be any real story or lore behind it. Just a monitor, a few cameras, and you reporting whether one of the people present has moved from one point of the map to another, as if you were doing the night shift in a public swimming pool haunted by boredom.

while i love liminal space games so much and i think this has some potential to be really good (i want to and i want to think there could be really good things that might be improved in this.) i feel like this one, while offering a lot of anomalies to be spotted, still feel "lacking" in uniqueness department and feels like a cashgrab for the genre that is already becoming really old. it doesn't offer anything new to the genre aside to the "jump scare" which feels so cheap and lazy and i feel like the genre wont even change if this game didn't even exist or was removed. it might be a harsh commentary but i need to state it. it might offer a lot of anomalies that can be spotted, i feel like this game has "too much of it" and it failed to realize or apply what makes its predecessor (exit 8, observation duty etc.) feels so refreshing and exciting. i feel like what devs can do to this game is to add something that makes the game feel exciting. or interesting or make it feel different and unique compared to not only to the entire anomaly hunt subgenre, but also to the 8AM series itself cause looking at this and to the other 8AM ones, it kinda feels like they are copy pasted game with just different environment. all this game need is a really unique mechanic to make it better and exciting. but otherwise, as long as the game stay like this, i wont recommend this game to anyone, not even to people who like liminal spaces and anomaly hunt games.