As you might expect of the man running a site called DagonDogs, or as you might assume of the singer in a band called Hounds of Innsmouth, I enjoy me some horror inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft when it’s done well. Unfortunately, Lovecraft stories are notoriously difficult to translate to a medium other than text due to his style of writing and the emphasis on the things you can’t really see or understand. Despite the overwhelming tidal wave of video games inspired by Lovecraft that have been made over the course of the past couple decades, there really have been only a small handful to have ever done it right. This is why, when I saw the first few minutes of someone playing The Shore, I was excited and hopeful that The Shore would be another one of those few games to scratch the Lovecraft itch.

The Short of It

What I Played

1 complete playthrough of the ‘story’
3 hours

Pros

Visuals and sound all work well together to make some cool and creepy spots
First few minutes before the weird things start coming out of the water is the best
Mostly soothing music

Cons

Level design is not good
Invisible walks for days in a walking-simulator game leads to a bad experience
Loses its edge pretty quickly
Barely a story
Puzzles are not really puzzles and don’t add anything to the experience
Combat sections are not fun
$12 is too much to spend on a game of this quality

The Rest of It

The first five minutes of The Shore are very reminiscent of Lovecraft’s own story, Dagon. You wash up on a foreign beach with no idea of how you got there. The rocks are jagged and black. The terrain is tough to navigate. There is a lone lighthouse that seems abandoned. There also seems to be something huge in the water, just under the surface. The protagonist talks to himself, filling in the back story as to why we might be trapped on this unknown shore, and providing other character motivations that will need to be resolved at some point. It all starts out promising and exciting enough.

That promise, hopefulness, and excitement doesn’t take long to wear off once you round a few corners and start having to find the key items to progress, however. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I started to feel the twinge of regret buying this game, but I know it wasn’t long after I encountered my first invisible wall and before the third time I got stuck in some of the geometry. There’s not much for you to do in this game other than walk around and pick stuff up, so it’s especially frustrating when so much of your time is spent navigating around invisible walls, looking for the item to progress. Having spent only about three hours with the game and completing its story, I can say that at least a third of it was spent trying to figure out where to go and how to get there without getting caught in a hall of transparent walls. The Shore is a walking simulator that doesn’t do the walking very well.

I have long been a defender of the walking-simulator game, to the point that I don’t consider the sub-genre title of ‘walking-simulator’ a pejorative. I’ve gotten a decent amount of entertainment out of playing these games with my friends as something of an interactive haunted house, ie Layers of Fear, Observer, PT. However, each one of those games I just mentioned had a ton of polish to them when it came to the environments and the scenarios in which you found yourself. The Shore lacks a lot of the better qualities of those examples in its design. I’ll admit, they are all games in which you do little more than walk through narrow hallways. So there weren’t any open areas for invisible walls to be necessary. Nonetheless, it’s not like more elegant solutions could not have been used in controlling the exploration and movement of the player.

Sadly, even when you do figure out where to go and what to do, the game doesn’t get much more interesting. As any horror fan could tell you, the tension and excitement leading up to the moment you see and experience the horror is better than the horror itself. This is true for The Shore as well. Once the weird eldritch creatures start showing up, they show up in full force, losing their mystery and creepiness. There are several spots in which you have to run or combat them in a rather simple manner, but these moments are hardly exciting or scary. In fact, a fair amount of those moments felt like they fell out of other games that did those environments and encounters better, such as Amnesia or even Half-Life. Considering the walking simulator is not so good at the ‘walking’ parts, you can probably guess that the chase and combat sequences are not great either.

It’s all a shame because there is something about The Shore that could have been good. There are a lot of small things you can point to where you see the inspiration. You can see what the developers were going for. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time, money, and talent to make any of the good ideas become something fun or interesting. Instead, The Shore just ends up being a frustrating stroll along a beach that is awash with unfinished, hollow, disappointing attempts at good ideas.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Despite there being some cool moments and designs in The Shore that I really liked, I cannot recommend it to even the most enthusiastic H.P. Lovecraft fan. In many ways, The Shore is like a haunted house ride that is going through all of Lovecraft’s ‘greatest hits’ as you wander the area. Unfortunately, its also like a ride that falls off the tracks and dumps you into a hall of mirrors, forcing you to wander for hours as you bump into walls you didn’t realize were there. There are some really cool things about The Shore that it does right to make you feel like you’re in a Lovecraft story, but they are quickly overshadowed by the miserable experience of playing the game.

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