Picture an empty indoor pool, fluorescent lights humming overhead, the faint echo of nothing in particular. No people. No narrative. Just that specific dread of a space that should be full but isn't. That feeling has spawned an entire subgenre on Steam, and right now it's bigger than ever.
Dreamcore's suburban void
The week ending May 24 saw Dreamcore, a first-person collection of explorable liminal spaces by developer Montraluz, pick up fresh attention after dropping a new Dead Mall map. The update added an endlessly sprawling shopping centre modelled on the 1990s exurban megamall, and it hit at exactly the right cultural moment.
Why dead malls feel so unsettling right now
There's a reason the Dead Mall map landed the way it did. Those giant retail complexes once felt like the centre of gravity for suburban life, and now they mostly exist as monuments to a pre-eCommerce world. Walking through Dreamcore's version of one carries a specific kind of melancholy that's hard to manufacture. The emptiness isn't just aesthetic, it's loaded with context.
Here's the thing: liminal spaces work in games because the medium is uniquely positioned to make you feel present in a space. A photo of an empty pool is eerie. Walking through one in first-person, with ambient audio and no clear exit, is something else entirely.
This sense of dislocation is the engine running underneath most of the genre's best entries. The peculiar horror isn't jump scares or monsters. It's the combination of tense loneliness and the suggestion of a world where all public spaces have been quietly voided.
The pool problem: when a subgenre gets crowded
Steam currently has more liminal pool games than any reasonable person could finish. Pools, which drew attention back in 2025 for its experimental approach to swimming pool exploration, sits alongside Tainted Pools, Liminal Waters, and the forthcoming Backrooms Anomaly: Pools. If you find they all look identical (they do), there's even a PS1-era aesthetic take called Poolscape for the retro-inclined.
Beyond the pool fixation, titles like Dream Logic, Liminal Shift, Liminal Universe, and Anemoiapolis each take a similar scrapbook approach to the genre, stitching together a variety of unsettling spaces into loosely connected experiences.
What most players miss when they first search the tag is that quality varies enormously. A lot of these games are low-effort, opportunistic releases cashing in on an aesthetic that's cheap to produce. Recognising which ones are worth your time takes some navigation.
If you're new to the genre, avoid searching the Steam tag blindly. The signal-to-noise ratio is rough. Dreamcore, Pools, and Anemoiapolis are the three most consistently recommended starting points across community discussions.
What makes Dreamcore the right entry point
Dreamcore has been on Steam since January 2025 and has grown steadily since launch. The key here is scope: rather than fixating on a single location type, it samples from a range of readymade liminal archetypes. Indoor pools, yes, but also low-poly suburbia, barren children's play areas, and now the Dead Mall. Four of its maps include light puzzle elements, though the appeal is mostly just wandering discomforting locations at your own pace.
It also runs well, which sounds like a low bar but matters more than you'd expect in a genre where some releases feel like Unity asset flips with an ambient drone track slapped on top.
Dead Mall's hollow corridors
The Backrooms connection is worth noting too. The Backrooms remains the most recognisable liminal spaces property, a 4chan-derived creepypasta that has now spawned dozens of games and is reportedly heading toward a major film adaptation. Dreamcore doesn't lean heavily on Backrooms iconography, which actually works in its favour. It feels like its own thing rather than a licensed knock-off.
This week's Steam charts and a quiet surprise
The top Steam games by revenue for the week of May 12-19 looked like this:
Subnautica 2 topping the chart ahead of Forza Horizon 6 in its launch week is less surprising than it looks. Forza had pre-orders open for most of 2026 while Subnautica 2 did not, so the latter's launch-week surge pulled harder. The original Subnautica also climbed to 7th as players went back for the predecessor, and Subnautica: Below Zero hit 13th on the revenue chart.
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight will likely rank higher next week given how late in the week it released. At the time of writing it sits fourth in the realtime global bestsellers.
The real anomaly in the realtime chart right now is Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library, an April release that climbed to 8th in global bestsellers after a YouTube video from creator Skoottie accumulated 274,000 views in a single day. A reminder that a single well-timed video can still move the needle dramatically on Steam.
The deeper appeal of melancholy folk art games
The world does not need this many liminal spaces games. That's a fair take. But the genre's persistence on Steam points to something genuine: these games function as a form of 21st century folk art, built cheaply and distributed freely through a platform that doesn't require commercial ambition to participate in.
PC gaming has always had space for non-commercial obsessions, and the liminal spaces genre is a good example of why that matters. Most of these games aren't trying to compete with Subnautica 2 or Forza Horizon 6. They're trying to bottle a specific feeling and share it.
For the full picture on what's worth playing across the broader indie space this week, our game reviews have you covered, and our gaming guides section is worth bookmarking if you need a hand navigating any of the week's bigger releases.
