The Shore: Enhanced Edition review – A disappointing Lovecraftian adventure

After five years of being available on PC, Lovecraftian adventure game The Shore has finally made its way to consoles in the form of an Enhanced Edition. One delve into the game’s menus and you’ll wonder what’s so enhanced about it, though, especially when you go to view the controls and find that you’re presented with a screen filled with keyboard keys and no buttons. Things aren’t much better once you get into the game proper, with the audio settings being out of whack by default.

Once you’ve figured out the controls and adjusted the audio levels to your preferences, however, The Shore: Enhanced Edition does get a little bit better. You’ll find yourself in control of a guy named Andrew and, with a small island to explore, you’ll start to try to make sense of why he’s there. It soon becomes clear that he’s in search of his daughter, but there are strange forces at work on the island. The question is, will they hinder Andrew in his pursuit, or perhaps even help him?

The Shore: Enhanced Edition is a short game, taking around just two hours to complete. And it’s safe to say that it’s a game of two halves. The first hour or so will have you exploring an area around a lighthouse, finding items and investigating strange anomalies. While it’s fairly slow-paced, it proves to be engrossing enough to keep you invested, providing you don’t get stuck.

Things pretty much fall apart in the second half of the game, though, which feels like a collection of small scenes presented to you haphazardly. The gameplay in these sections, while a little more fleshed out, is disappointing, too, with the puzzles placed in your path being altogether too simplistic and unrewarding to solve, and your encounters with cosmic entities being hampered by clunky mechanics and controls. Instead of fear, you’ll more often feel frustration as you’re chased though fleshy corridors and otherworldly structures.

To finish things off, The Shore: Enhanced Edition has a very disappointing ending, made even worse by the fact that the quality of the voice acting suddenly nosedives off a cliff. And so, by the end of your time with it, you’ll no doubt be left disappointed by what could have been. There’s an interesting premise here, and some strong visual imagery, but it’s severely let down by its poor gameplay and more. If you’re a huge Lovecraft fan, you might get the occasional kick out of it, but it’s pretty hard to recommend otherwise.