People who are into games today generally know the term “walking sim.” It seems to have cropped up around the time of Dear Esther in 2012, a first-person adventure game in which you explore the Scottish countryside on foot, triggering memories of your lost loved one. To be fair, the game does mostly involve walking around, but there was a time when calling a game a “walking sim” was meant by some as a dig against it. That was true of Dear Esther and many games since then. One would use it to say, “This game lacks gameplay.” To an extent, that’s not the case anymore, as walking sim is now a genre label on Steam so fans of them can easily find more, and many games are built to attract an audience that enjoys this kind of game.
I like them, too, though I’ve always had something of an asterisk attached to my enjoyment. They didn’t work as horror games, despite many attempts. I find this pairing doesn’t work because walking sims often exclude mechanics besides things like moving and triggering dialogue. You can tell a good story in a walking-sim horror game, but in my experience, you can’t create a frightening game if I can easily peer through the game’s code, figuratively speaking, to find that there are no monster encounters to worry about. The game isn’t going to present me with any fail states, or at least not any elaborate situations in which I may or may not survive, which is where a horror story’s tension originates.
Simply put, if it’s clear the mechanics of a horror game won’t advance past, more or less, moving around alone, then the setting itself has to effectively sell the scare factor. Typical horror games have not shown an ability to do that effectively or consistently, in my experience. This has ruined countless horror games for me over the years. But one new game, Dreamcore, is helping solve it.
Dreamcore is a first-person “walking sim” horror game focused on liminal spaces and, a bit more specifically, the hazy, liminal-feeling worlds we often create in our dreams. Since 2020, the liminal space genre has exploded online in places like TikTok and YouTube, but also in video games. Liminal spaces are places, either real or invented, that express a feeling of liminality–a transitional space, often leading to a guttural sense of foreboding or worry.
Liminal spaces can feel unwelcoming, indecipherable, and out-of-time, like exploring the long-vacated remnants of a shopping mall, or they may instill that eerie feeling you might get when you’re alone in a long, quiet hotel hallway where every door is identical (and maybe the carpet is a little too Shining-esque). These experiences don’t affect everyone–in my home, my kids and I love going down liminal-space rabbit holes online, while my wife finds them totally unmoving. But for those who know the strangely alluring bad vibe they get from liminal spaces, there’s now a huge community out there creating, sharing, and experiencing these places together, both in reality and fiction.
Dreamcore seeks to provide a similar experience as other recent genre hits such as Pools and The Complex. They are walking sims at their heart, but they succeed where other similarly designed horror games often fail. Whereas a walking sim in a haunted house eventually has to put up or shut up regarding its threat of ghosts or demons lurking in the darkest corners of the home, a liminal space is the horror. More accurately, the intensity comes not from the setup and payoff of enemies to evade or fight, but the relentless feeling of complete unease that being in such a space elicits. It promises no monsters, no health bars, no chase sequences, and no fail-states. It is the exploration itself that is the horror, which makes walking, despite being the shallow limit to its gameplay mechanics, effective.
These places tap into something that seems to be lurking in my gut, and witnessing such spaces, real or virtual, brings it to the forefront. They feel like places I ought not to be and can’t easily escape. It’s been a refreshing and exciting feeling for me, as a lifelong horror fan, to find this busy subset of games coming out right now in which the mechanics are often only as deep as Dear Esther and yet the scare factor can often feel closer to Amnesia. That’s something that I’ve only found in the liminal-horror space, and not for lack of trying many other versions of what I call horror-adventure games.
In Dreamcore’s first of two worlds available today–more will be revealed and released later–you explore labyrinthine indoor pools, the likes of which genre devotees have maybe seen before. But even if you think you’ve seen this one before, I appreciate how far Dreamcore goes to achieve the vibe fans of liminal horror are searching for. There are puzzle elements to the game, built on paying close attention to the world even as you may sometimes feel you’re going in circles, and there are even a few interesting Easter eggs I won’t spoil.
There’s no combat in Dreamcore, no monsters–for that, you’ll want to explore another popular branch of liminal horror: The Backrooms. So why does it work so well as a walking sim? It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why that is. Maybe it’s the disembodied jazz music that echoes out across the seemingly endless, perplexing pool rooms–or, just as scary is when that music ends and leaves you with only your thoughts and footsteps. Maybe it’s the retro visual filter that gives it all the look of found footage from a 1990s camcorder, like you’ve found some kind of snuff film borne from REM sleep. Maybe it’s the way no wall, doorway, pool, or swirly waterslide looks like it belongs, and you can’t help but then wonder, what is it doing there? Who built it? Where is everyone? What am I doing here? Whatever it is, you’ll sense it too when you play it.
Its second level is based on a popular segment of liminal horror lore online, Level 94. You may have seen images like it in movies such as Toys or Vivarium. An endless stretch of similarly shaped houses decorate rolling, green hills. Each home can be entered, but the objective of reaching the water tower and discovering its secret plays out like a lab rat in a maze, as doors lead out to fenced-in pathways that are always roundabout, never direct. It’s purposely dizzying, and the juxtaposition of delicate, otherwise agreeable music with the world’s surreal and uncanny atmosphere fills me with unease, but it’s an unease I am somehow enchanted by, like a siren’s song.
Perhaps more than anything, what’s so creepy and yet so exciting about liminal spaces and video games depicting them is their ability to keep us in a dreamlike state. Everyone wakes from their dreams and senses the memory of them withering away. By breakfast, it can be hard to recall any moment of what we invented in our minds the night before, and they always feel like they went on much longer than they did–in reality, dreams are micro-stories, unfolding in just a few minutes at a time.
But Dreamcore and the ever-expanding liminal horror genre give us a chance to stay asleep, in a sense. And when we can confront those disquietingly shaped rooms, impossible neighborhoods, and that feeling of unease that washes over us completely, it allows for a novel horror experience, and a walking sim that finally horrifies.
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