The Shore Review: It’s R’lyeh Weird
Post Created by: Wayne Goodchild
The Shore is a short Lovecraftian horror developed and published by Dragonis Games, and it’s out now on PS5 as an “Enhanced Edition.” It’s super weird and I love it, but your mileage will likely vary depending on your tolerance for ‘Tentacles = Lovecraft.’
Normally I add a trailer for a game but this time I’m linking to it as it’s chock-full of spoilers, so watch it at your own risk; I’ll avoid explicit spoilers in my review because part of the joy I got from The Shore was discovering just how unhinged it gets.
Lovecraft Fans, Lend me Your Iäs
Generally speaking, if someone creates Lovecraftian/weird fiction (no matter the medium) it falls into one of two camps: the story invokes a sense of cosmic dread as a person tries to come to terms with incomprehensible horror, or the story throws a bunch of giant tentacled monsters at the reader/player/viewer and hopes for the best. This game asks: “Why can’t it be both?”
Right away, The Shore does two things I really appreciate: you can look down and see your character’s body, and the protagonist, Andrew, is fully-voiced (by someone who sounds like Nick Offerman, which is something I couldn’t unhear). A chunk of the game takes place on a mysterious island that, for an unknown amount of time, has been drawing people in and causing shipwrecks (these are some of the best examples of environmental storytelling The Shore dabbles in).
Andrew has gone there himself in an effort to find his missing daughter, but it becomes immediately apparent that things are super messed-up. Aside from the smashed-up boats, there are skeletal remains and copious notes from former inhabitants/shipwreck survivors, all of which point to an island where the sun never moves and from which escape is impossible.
The Shore gets totally nuts with its idea of what constitutes “Lovecraftian” within the first five minutes; not only did I get a glimpse of some huge tentacled thing but I also stumbled across multiple weird sites like giant orbs, creepy rituals, and more that I won’t spoil here. These are all within a roughly 50 meter radius of the lighthouse at the start of the game, and they all told me that The Shore was going for a grab-bag approach. The good news is it sure as hell commits to this concept.
Esoteric Island Action
I also really appreciate that The Shore doesn’t hold the player’s hand. You can view an inventory of items you’ve collected, but there’s no map or journal – it’s up to you to figure out where to go and what to do. However, keep in mind that exploration is severely limited; I thought I might get to wander around the island looking for clues, but instead I found that The Shore is broken up into multiple self-contained sections. The lighthouse is the first, and I spent a good amount of time investigating it and figuring out which weird items went where to unlock new paths.
The Shore is the first game in a while where I actively enjoyed trying to get decent screenshots, as it has an abundance of moments where I stumbled across monolithic ruins. These all give a suitable sense of scale, and suggest that something gigantic once walked the basalt coast of the island. And then, well, you find out exactly what walked the island and wants to again. Right before it then literally rides off into the metaphorical sunset. Believe me, I want to tell you how weird this section was but you need to see it for yourself.
What I will tell you, though, is that this scene was preceded by a good example of how The Shore handles puzzles. I had three sort-of altars I could interact with: one had a levitating dodecahedron, the other two had floating fish-head things. These in turn were next to posts that had glowing rods sticking out of them. Through a lot of experimenting, I eventually realized that the rods had to be interacted with to create glowing orbs, which then had to be inserted into the fish-head statutes. This in turn created more glowing orbs that could be used to make the dodecahedron rotate.
This took a bit longer to figure out in part because the crosshair only appears when you can interact with something, and it’s a small bronze eye icon that doesn’t stand out very well so it’s easy to miss something unless you’re really paying attention. I honestly don’t know whether this is on purpose, though, as The Shore has a bunch of idiosyncratic design choices throughout (like how you have to wait to unlock a jump button, or how an underwater section controls in exactly the same way as when you’re on land).
Cosmic Chapodiphobia
The main brunt of The Shore is what really sold it for me, and it’s a welcome pivot to actual cosmic horror. Andrew ends up following a demonic voice/entity that promises it can help him find his daughter if he helps it. I know what you’re thinking, and I was also absolutely sure nothing could go wrong with this, wink wink.
As part of the deal, Andrew gets sucked into a multitude of super weird scenarios that sometimes take place in what might be the same cosmic area, but other times involve things like a gross meat world. All of them are stuffed with tentacles though. Writhing, wet tentacles. Too many to be taken seriously, really, but I admire the commitment to the bit.
By this point, I’d also picked up a black pyramid (that sprouts tentacles of course) that let me zap enemies, although I liked that it didn’t turn Andrew into some kind of proto-FPS hero. Enemies can be either completely disintegrated by a blast from the pyramid, banished for a few seconds, or momentarily frozen in place.
Some of the writhing monstrosities that came after me were completely unharmed by it and I didn’t know which these were until I tried to zap them and got, I assume, devoured. Luckily, death usually takes you back to a nearby checkpoint (there’s no indication where these are though) and the vignettes that make up the back half of the game are short enough that any frustration is short-lived.
The pyramid turns most puzzles into “zap it and see what happens” in the latter part of The Shore, so while there’s no real art to this mechanic at least it’s consistent. And to the game’s credit, it’s not always apparent what should be zapped to progress, or in what order. I understand how this might annoy some players, but I liked the experimentation (and mild panic) it encourages, especially when there was some giant meat-beast lumbering after me at the same time.
Peripheral Vision
It’s not all tentacle monsters and abstract puzzles, though. A few sections make suitable use of subtle horror, like having the eyeballs of maybe-statues follow your movement, and a section filled with sort-of monster babies twitching and spasming when they’re not fully in view. The Shore is only three hours long but it crams a lot of ideas into its runtime.
Monster designs might lean overall too heavily on “stick tentacles and teeth on it” but none actually look the same, and there are a few ‘minor’ enemies that may have once been human and move a bit like Silent Hill mutants. All-in-all the art is really cool and takes clear inspiration from the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński.
As does Necrophosis, another game by Dragonis Games, and this is where I get a little down on what’s going on here. You see, this review is for the PS5 version of The Shore, so it’s technically a new release, but the game actually first came out on PC in 2021 (and for VR in 2022). However, take a look at the Dragonis site and you’ll see that Necrophosis shares assets with The Shore, as does another earlier game, Eresys. Or at least iterations of what’s seen in The Shore.
Necrophosis came out in 2018 but has a newer release date of April 25, 2025; Eresys was released on PC in 2023. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a studio/dev reusing assets or reiterating on similar ideas (look at Housemarque’s recent Saros, and how similar it is to the studio’s previous title, Returnal), but it is disappointing that this makes The Shore less unique than I initially thought.
Enhanced, Somehow
Dragonis Games comprises a small team headed by Ares Dragonis, whose online bio uses language like “Ares Dragonis is the visionary force behind the captivating video games, The Shore and Eresys” and “Through his unparalleled creative prowess, Ares Dragonis has left an indelible mark on the world of video gaming.”
I’m all for shameless self-promotion but if you’re saying things like this then you either have a certified hit under your belt or aren’t entirely in touch with reality. Given how completely nuts The Shore gets I’m willing to bet it’s the latter, and I genuinely mean that as a compliment.
Things like this are what makes it unclear as to what counts as “Enhanced” in this version of The Shore. It looked pretty good on PC already, so I can’t say the visuals have been taken up a notch, and the overall design certainly hasn’t been improved. For example, the main menu and options feel like placeholders, the subtitles need to be ‘Disabled’ to work (and they’re tiny when they do), and while the voice acting for Andrew is really good, he tends to read a lot of the notes he finds…which also sometimes have redundant subtitles, since the note itself is clearly legible.
There are typos throughout (“slumpering god” was an interesting one) and some of the settings are obtuse (Camera Movement…?). Things like this certainly don’t ruin the experience (again, I really enjoyed playing The Shore) but it doesn’t look very good for your studio when an Enhanced Edition makes it to release with these quirks.
Coastal Cosmic Horror
I’m an unashamed fan of cosmic horror, but I do tend to roll my eyes at the easy route a lot of Lovecraftian video games take. For every one that focuses on sanity and surviving unknowable terror, there are plenty that have you gunning down relentless hordes of monsters. The Shore doesn’t fall into the latter camp, but neither does it really engage with the former idea.
The ending somehow manages to play into the “both sides” mentality of the rest of the game by wrapping things up but also leaves some plot points ambiguous. The soundtrack can’t make up its mind whether it wants to focus on overwrought, orchestral strings or dark, menacing synths. It should be a mess yet it manages to always feel cohesive.
I can easily see how and why this approach might not land with gamers, especially those who prefer a more cerebral take on Cthulhu and his ilk. But it works for me because, rather than being a game of half-measures, The Shore’s kitchen sink approach to cosmic horror somehow ends up feeling distinctive.
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