The Shore is a Lovecraft-themed Horror Adventure Game created by 3D character artist Ares Dragonis, with some help from a programmer and a composer. It's basically an assortment of Lovecraft-themed creature assets that Dragonis had been working on for almost a year, tied together into an Environmental Narrative Game experience. The game was released for PC on February 21st, 2021, on Steam.
The story follows Andrew, an older fisherman, who wakes up on the shore of a mysterious island inhabited by an assortment of Lovecraftian horrors, and sets out in search of his missing daughter Ellie.
This game provides examples of:
- All Just a Dream: The ending espouses on the Lovecraftian premise that reality is just a dream of Azathoth the Sleeping God. Also, on a more personal level, the Shadow reveals that Ellie never existed and that he created the memories of her in Andrew's mind so that he would have a purpose to drive him and wouldn't lose his focus and fail like the other souls the Shadow lured to the island.
- Apocalyptic Log: Andrew can find notes and journals from previous human visitors to the island that give a hint as to their fates (none of which were at all pleasant).
- Big Bad: The Shadow/Nyarlathotep.
- Body Horror: Picking up the artifact causes Andrew's arm holding it to turn into solid black matter.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Andrew finds himself the pawn of one of the Great Old Ones and ends up confronting a number of Lovecraftian horrors in his search for his daughter.
- Eldritch Location: The island might as well be the shores of R'lyeh considering how much otherworldly activity is found on it.
- The Void dimension is a dark, Giger-esque realm complete with a giant protoplasmic abomination (implied to be a massive Shoggoth), strange artifacts, puzzles and alien technology, servants of deities such as Shub-Niggurath's dark young and smaller shoggoths. Not to mention an imprisoned Cthulhu and an avatar of Nyarlathotep. The whole place could be based off descriptions of the planet Yuggoth.
- The Immune: Andrew realizes that he's managed to stay sane in the face of cosmic horror that has driven everyone that came before him mad. He chalks it up to his boring personality, but it's later indicated that the Shadow gave him false memories so he'd be able to remain focused and not lose his mind while performing his tasks.
- Message in a Bottle: The game begins with you finding one on a beach, and the first thing you do is (of course) uncorking it to see what's written:I have been arguing with John about how many actual days have passed since we ended up here. It seems that all our hopes are drifting away, like these bottles should do... but they always return to this spot as if something is leading them back here.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The first half of the game is very much an Environmental Narrative Game/Walking Simulator (in many ways Dear Esther with Lovecraft monsters), but about halfway through you have a few chase sequences, and about 2/3rds of the way through you acquire a magical weapon and experience a couple of basic shooting sequences, including what is essentially a Final Boss fight (albeit one that doesn't have any major story significance).
