Systems: Windows, HTC Vive
Release Date: February 19, 2021
Publisher: Dragonis Games
Developer: Ares Dragonis
Time Spent: 4.7 Hours
The Shore is a relatively short first-person exploration game that combines walking sim with minor puzzles where you occasionally have to run away from whatever is chasing you during a handful of sequences. That is until you acquire an artifact of cosmic origin that can be used to activate doors and stun certain creatures who would like to erase your existence. It is also one of the better video game depictions of a whole cacophony of Lovecraftian mythos I have played.
I actually had another article about halfway completed, but then like a lot of articles about Lovecraftian games, they got bogged down in histories of cosmic mythos heavily peppered with my own feelings of inadequacies in writing about the topic. There were so many references, both implied and explicit, to different stories by Lovecraft (such as The Mountains of Madness, Dagon, A Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Color Out Of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, etc) that I had a hard time trying to find a common thread between them all. I also found myself being accidentally contradictory praising the developer Ares Dragonis for what felt like a focused story, but at the same time having so many different creatures from so many different stories that the overall story no longer felt as cohesive and coherent as I declared it to be.
So instead of all of that, we are going to limit today's article to a few more words, and then a handful more visuals from the game, which is really what grabbed me for the six or so months that I have been following the Instagram account for The Shore.
So while I did enjoy about 91% of the game, there were quite a few encounters in the late game that had me seriously questioning if I was actually going to be able to finish. As mentioned earlier, The Shore starts out as a walking sim akin to Dear Esther, but there is at first a brief event where you have to actually run away from a creature or be killed. I did die the first time because I was not expecting something to actually run at me, but the second time I was able to escape. I felt that this was to introduce the mechanic that there are going to be things that will hunt and kill you, and whoo-boy does that become all there nearly is in the last quarter of the game.
Once you enter this section of that game, it feels like all you are doing is wandering in a linear fashion from one strange-looking room to another punctuated by a spawning young from Shub-Niggurath. While I could not find a way to kill one of the Thousand Young, you could use your cosmic weapon to temporarily stun them just long enough to run away around a corner before you had to stop and stun them again once they were close enough. Using this cosmic weapon was also how you unlocked doors and I use the term "door" loosely here. All of this would frequently happen in a maze of hallways and fleshy columns/structures, so when you died and respawned back at the checkpoint/entrance, you had to quickly decide if you wanted to try running the same way where you died in the hopes of finding an exit or attempting another path to find one.
Other than these frantic and frustrating moments of running and dying and running again and dying again, along with a few poorly-placed and designed triggers/buttons that I had to look up a walkthrough for, I really liked what Ares Dragonis has done here with Lovecraft's cosmic horror mythos and successfully managed to create a sense of scale that I don't know if I have experienced before.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. And it played and looked great on the Steam Deck (as I'm sure that I wouldn't be able to run it on Ultra settings on my laptop).
I'm still not 100% sure what this was supposed to be referencing if anything at all.
Can't have a Lovecraft game with ol' faithful.
This scene alone is why I want to play this game in VR.
Here's what happened in-game.
Here's what happened in-game.
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