Dreamcore is a collection of first-person explorable “liminal spaces”. All the most obvious examples are included: There’s an eerily nostalgic labyrinth of indoor pools, an endless expanse of low-poly suburbia, a maze of barren children’s play areas, and—least interestingly, in my opinion—a “liminal hotel” styled on a Backrooms meme.

Liminal spaces are incredibly popular on Steam, just as they continue to be on most social media platforms. The term implies negative space and thresholds: places that are for passing through but not lingering in. They’re usually bleak, empty expanses that are meant to be lively and bustling. Its most popular manifestation is the Backrooms, a creepypasta meme which continues to spawn countless games. It’s probably the first 4chan-derived meme to get a major film adaptation.

Dreamcore has been out since January 2025 but has grown since then. Last week it got a new map in the form of Dead Mall which, as the name implies, takes place in an endlessly sprawling shopping centre styled on 1990s exurban behemoths. It feeds on a growing nostalgia for the once-maligned super mall, which nowadays feel like increasingly obsolete monuments to a less atomised time before eCommerce, fast delivery and brain-mulching smartphones.

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This sense of loss is low-key the main driving force behind a lot of the main liminal spaces locales. Their peculiar horror comes from an unsettling combination of a tense loneliness, and the sense of living in a worst-case scenario future where all public spaces are voided.