REVIEW : The Shore (PC)
The Shore relates the story of a fisherman who appears to have washed up on a deserted island with black sands. Your main objective is to learn what’s happening and, presumably, to attempt and find out a way off of this piece of rock before you start conversing with volleyballs because you have no actual idea what’s going on other from a few cryptic hints occasionally.
This walking simulator is a little more involved than normal, and it is set on the gloomy cliffs of what I take to be a New England beach. There are riddles to solve, however they require finding the object and using it where it can be used. Really, it isn’t the point at hand. It focuses more on following directions than anything else. When you boot The Shore, its stunning good looks are likely to catch your eye right away. Given how beautiful the world’s design and texturing are, Ares Dragonis is a 3D artist. In all honesty, I believe that I would have been content to spend a few hours simply going about and carefully exploring this island in a world that looks this beautiful.
In the game The Shore, you take control of Andrew, a fisherman looking for his daughter on a weird island populated by undesirables. As you pass by the boat wrecks, their hulls smashed and splintered on the seashore, black volcanic rock floods your vision. Seashells on the ground look up at you while seabirds tend to their nests. A black, featureless orb or a terrifying, glowing meteorite may be visible at closer range. There is a serious issue with this island. Andrew strikes a contract with an eldritch monstrosity to locate his daughter. Investigating the region near a lighthouse in the early stages of the game entails discovering scattered papers and letters.
The Shore excels at this last part, providing spooks like to those in Amnesia in the form of quickly dissipating anomalies as you turn the camera around or by employing aural cues to make you scan the horizon for the final indication of something that really shouldn’t be there. The protagonist’s gaze will be on the player as they awaken on the island’s coast. He will come across images, notes in bottles, and the wreckage of damaged ships as he moves through the sand and rocks. Each of these items has a tale to tell. Andrew serves as the primary narrator of The Shore. Players will gain knowledge of the area’s history as well as the fate of its shipwrecks through it. The voice acting is obviously lacking in quality, notably in the voices of the other characters, who sound sketchy in comparison to Andrew’s voice, which has the appropriate tone.
Whatever I would have been content with, the game’s realism had to suddenly pull me back up at some time. Not only is the gameplay more akin to a game of hide-and-seek and a scavenger hunt, but “a couple of hours” was definitely being charitable. Actually, the most of your time in The Shore is spent escaping from monsters who run just quickly enough to prevent you from escaping with your skin intact and firing cosmic terror lasers from your hand.
However, a lot of the design is quite awkward. On the beach, there are far too many dead-ends, and people rarely solve puzzles on purpose.
It mentioned inexperienced level design, and more specifically that the game hadn’t been played by many people before it was released. By doing this, a lot of problems can be found and areas where your game requires improvement can be quickly identified.
On that topic, I strongly advise against using a controller if you intend to play The Shore any time soon. When it comes to the latter sprinting sequences, it’s entirely useless, even though it largely functions well for the puzzle-solving, if you can even call it that. You must quickly turn 180 degrees to stop enemies long enough for you to flee, then 180 degrees again to continue running while they are confused. Unfortunately, even with the sensitivity set to the maximum, the controller’s turn speed is exceedingly slow, effectively. Brandon Fague does a great job at voicing the player’s character, who is quite predictably searching for his missing daughter. However, there are numerous errors in the textual content and captions. Fantastic scenery notwithstanding, mobility is awkward and hindered by intangible barriers.
A key component of both the main and subsidiary problems is exploring the island to obtain the essential objects. Up until the story’s halfway point, the player is free to explore the island as he pleases for the first hour of gameplay. From there, it appears that the decisions made lead to a “compromise,” which significantly curtails the true purpose of inquiry.
The Shore has some excellent visuals, although they may occasionally be a pain. The incredibly accurate cosmically drawn textures on the walls and floors during chase sequences cause the pathways to begin to converge. The majority of the time, you are essentially sprinting through a maze, so it is difficult to know where you have been and where you are heading, making these a nightmare of attrition. In the end, I was able to avoid getting touched by most of them by rushing forward and trying to complete a 180-degree turn quickly enough.
The Shore’s story is intriguing and doesn’t exactly rehash Lovecraft’s writings like many games of its like. However, it doesn’t work out that way in the end.
There aren’t many specifics about what is happening at any particular time, and we don’t really get a sense of Andrew as a person. However, a lot of the vistas and particular instances are pretty remarkable. Unholy behemoths rampaging through far-off waves make for some remarkable character modelling. Additionally, the sound design is consistently top-notch.
Then there is the fighting. You’ll need to combat creatures at certain stages in the game, which essentially entails pressing the use key to fire a laser and holding it against the foe long enough for it to vanish. This feels damned awful, to put it simply. There is nothing particularly difficult about eliminating the adversaries, and the laser just seems light.That is most likely The Shore’s worst flaw overall. It fundamentally misinterprets the purpose of cosmic horror, like many Lovecraft-inspired games do. Cthulhu is a huge, green, tentacle-faced monster, but he’s not supposed to be frightening. Cthulhu is terrifying because he is a cosmic being whose entire appearance is so far outside the pale of human understanding that even a fleeting sight at it would shatter mankind’s feeble mortal mind.
