
In the forest outside of town, four friends discover a mysterious black pool that transports them to an unknown world. To fight their way home, they must unlock and master supernatural abilities. Play cooperative or solo in this high-paced action game of skill that varies each session.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
About
The Black Pool is a 3d action roguelike to be played solo or preferably with up to 3 of your friends. Each attempt to make it back home will take you through a gauntlet of different worlds. You will discover different elements, abilities, and upgrades. Striking visuals, an electrifying soundtrack, and high-paced skilled action will plunge you into each attempt to battle your way out.
The Black Pool has taken you to a remote and unknown galactic system. In each attempt to return home, you will traverse across a random sequence of highly diverse worlds. Throughout your journey, carefully select powers from a large pool of random possibilities, complementing existing abilities and those of your friends. Strategically upgrade these abilities to maximize your potential. This procedural sequence of worlds, offerings of abilities, and upgrades, yields a highly replayable roguelike sequence which ensures that every session is completely unique. There are millions of possibilities. Committing to decisions and improvising an effective build is core to the game. Can you become powerful enough to face what lies ahead?
With each attempt you will learn how enemies behave and what their weaknesses are. You will learn how each of these supernatural abilities work, and synergistic ways to use abilities together. In addition, you unlock permanent enhancements that persist across playthrough attempts which make you stronger, and also enable varied play styles.
While you can try and make it on your own, it may be more fun to bring a friend, or three. The Black Pool has been designed to maximize the cooperative multiplayer experience. Many of the abilities contain game mechanics that deliver fun and rewarding interactions between players. Redirect friendly attacks, amplify each other's spells, coordinate stuns and buffs, and much more. In The Black Pool, co-op play is more than simply playing the game together— you are rewarded for actually working together to be successful.
The Black Pool patch 1.2 introduces an entirely new game mode: Arena Survivors— a fast and intense battle arena featuring rapid progression and randomized waves of increasingly more difficult enemies. It delivers a fun and highly replayable “survivors-like” spin on The Black Pool gameplay and also provides a quick way to experiment with abilities and builds without the time commitment of a full playthrough. A successful Arena Survivors attempt will take around 30 minutes, compared to 90 minutes for the full game mode. Four unique arenas have been developed for Arena Survivors, each presenting varied and evolving layouts, hazards, and challenges.
10 unique worlds, consisting of over 50 unique levels which dynamically adjust based on procedural selection.
90 unique abilities and augments derived from 9 elements: Fire, Light, Ice, Decay, Terra, Wind, Lightning, Void, and Chaos.
99 upgrades for abilities and augments.
18 upgradeable device powers which enhance player progression across playthrough attempts.
55 enemies, including 11 unique multi-stage boss encounters.
Original musical score consisting of 7 dynamic tracks which seamlessly progress with the playthrough sequence, and 10 tracks for the Temple hub world.
4 multi-tier endgame challenge modes (3 options for each).
Randomized event challenges that reward players with augments and other special upgrades.
Cooperative multiplayer up to 4 players.
Recovery for disconnected or uncompleted playthrough sessions in both single and multiplayer.
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English*, Spanish - Spain*, Spanish - Latin America*, French*, German*, Japanese*, Russian*, Simplified Chinese**languages with full audio support
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 44 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 44 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
The slop mines are lush, 0/10 game 10/10 time
This is shovelware 10/10
the poeple yearn for the slop
Good soup
It's a fun coop game with friends with interesting synergies and cool builds. Each element has a niche and honestly this game is great for a friend-slop adjacent experience with some more legs than a lot of games with that moniker. Performance can be a bit iffy but I believe this game is UE5 which tracks.
Pretty cool game, I'm a sucker for indie games
game doesnt work crashes instantly on any setting change wont play after cutscene crashed my whole pc
i see its on sale buy it then add me this game is cool
Quite fun.
I want to like this game but it's ROUGH. The premise is cool: think of Returnal but low budget. Cool skill combo ideas, some very original skill mechanics... But also some really underwhelming ones. Sound design is all over the place: the music is cool but the sound effects are mostly awful. Skills with cool visual effects lack punch in their audio, making them feel wimpy. Aside from that, as mentioned at the start the game is really rough. Movement is floaty and imprecise, camera does weird things often and the controls are not very responsive. All three are very important features for a roguelike. All in all, the game has good bones but I don't think the developer plans on growing it much further. I'd only advice getting this if you're starved for a new 3D action roguelite and wanna try something different. But be prepared for the jank, and get it at a sale.
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Trends
Modeled estimate over time, reconstructed from Steam's monthly review histogram.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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