8AM: The Swimming Pool Review (PC)

The clock is about to strike midnight, and all that I have to keep me company through till the eleventh hour is a monitor and a faint idea of what I need to do before a new dawn breaks. There’s a public swimming pool, a beaming light, and a wave of nocturnal guests wading through the waters, some with calculated routines, some with erratic behavior that keep me awake and itching to pull the trigger. But other than that, it’s quiet, calm, and somewhat peaceful. And yet, it isn’t what happens before midnight that concerns me; it’s what will take place in the aftermath of the closure. See, I’ve heard stories about the witching hours—the period during which anomalies tend to become a little more sprightly and gravitate toward the pool. It’s that phase of the shift that worries me. It’s also the fact that, while I have the power to judge the situation, I have no power to intervene or make a real difference. In this small booth, I can only observe the anomalies, but never quell their motives or turn the tide against them.

8AM: The Swimming Pool isn’t all that different from your usual Exit 8 game, in that you have a simple yet somewhat unusual job to perform: scout the location—a public swimming pool in this case, naturally—and search for anomalies. Is anyone acting strange? Is the ripple in the water a natural occurrence, or is it a force that dares to be absorbed through the lens of your camera? How many people were there before you took to the next hour? Is there anything different about the atmosphere, or have you been awake for so long that vague hallucinations are beginning to merge with reality? A lot of questions, and sure enough, a lot of peculiarities to manipulate your train of thought.

Of course, if you’re vaguely familiar with anomaly hunting games, then you’ll have a firm understanding of how they usually work. Similar to what you might have seen before, the experience largely consists of monitoring subtle changes in the environment, and figuring whether or not the change is intentional, or if it’s to do with a supernatural shift in the world. For example, if you happen to find yourself scouring a small section of the public pool, but begin to find a ripple in a static area, then you may find yourself with a question to answer: Is it just a ripple, or is there something else that lurks beneath the surface? It’s your job, in short, to separate simple environmental occurrences from supernatural happenings.

There is a small catch to all of the above: unlike most anomaly hunting games in which you can utilize the power of various tools to snag and quell anomalies, 8AM doesn’t give you the same breathing room to fight back, so to speak. In this world, you can only choose to observe and document, but never act on your wildest impulses. To make matters that much worse, you can only pivot the hands of the clock closer to the end of your shift by making the right decisions and correctly deciphering fact from fiction. In other words, unless you can successfully locate the peculiar activities that orbit the pool, you will never be given the opportunity to clock out from your role as the “silent vigil.” A tough break, though it does come with its own silver lining, thankfully.

On the plus side of all of this, the job itself isn’t all that difficult to crack. I’ll admit that, while the game does cough up over a hundred anomalies with distinctly different characteristics for you to find, the act of locating them and progressing through the shift is, in all honesty, a walk in the park. Well, it’s a lot easier than you average Exit 8 clone, in that it doesn’t really require a stern eye for detail in order to make critical observations and shovel through the experience. Of course, it does present a sizable challenge for you to overcome, what with its relatively large collection of anomalies and unusual phenomena. That said, with a compact environment and a decent camera system that allows you to spot the changes in the wind a lot easier than your grand-scale phishing expedition, it is awfully difficult to hit a fork in the road, so to speak.

Suffice it to say, there’s a rather small game here that you could probably sweep beneath the surface in a single sitting. It doesn’t offer much replay value, as it keeps itself to the one primary location and what have you. However, with a solid variety of anomalies to spot and a genuinely intriguing location with a lot of nooks and crannies available for you to scrub through, I’d say that it warrants the price of admission. It’s still a dime-a-dozen concept that leans into a lot of the same basic ideas, but for what it’s worth, it more than meets the needs of the target demographic.

Verdict

8AM: The Swimming Pool is a short but thoughtfully constructed anomaly-centric observational thriller that captures the uncertainty and eeriness of its world with its sizable collection of supernatural happenings and thought-provoking clockwork encounters. It still falls into the same waters as your traditional anomaly hunting excursion I’ll admit, but to give credit where it’s due, it does adopt its own rules of engagement and gameplay mechanics. That’s a lot more than what most indie observation decks tend to bring to the table, to be honest.

While there’s still a relatively short game here that isn’t likely to squash your hunger for a cascading waterfall of long-lasting thrills, 8AM still makes for a pleasantly satisfying dip in the deep end as a gripping and oftentimes provoking tidal wave of supernatural energy and frosty occurrences. If that sounds like something that you’d happily get your toes wet for, then I’d say that the asking price is more than worth the chance to slip into its waters for a short while.