Shines Over: The Damned review

• Reviews by Drew Onia
• Published:

Impressive atmosphere is dogged by shallow gameplay and impenetrable narrative in this short, personal horror game

If I’m being generous, Shines Over: The Damned feels like a personal piece, a work of art by the creator, for the creator. It’s a secret piece of trauma, codified into a game like a diary entry. If I’m being more cynical, the game feels like a quick and dirty project, gluing several disjointed gameplay concepts together into a barely forty-minute experience. Either way, Shines Over is hard to recommend. It isn’t completely without merit: it’s atmospheric, albeit brief and simplistic, with a few good jump scares, but even if that’s all you’re looking for in a game, there are still many better choices available than this brief, underwhelming horror game.

Shines Over begins with a blurb about astral projection in the main menu, written as a journal entry. It gives some context to the world you will be exploring, but keeps your own goal vague. Starting out, you (the nameless, unseen protagonist) emerge from a cave and descend the side of a cliff via a short platforming segment. At the base, you are corralled down a ruined roadway, at the end of which you meet a German Shepherd. Here your character asks (via subtitles), “Did your owner already cross into the shadows?”

Continuing down a set of steps, you reach a shallow pool gleaming with an ominous red hue. As you step into the pond, the game warns you about fending off enemies right before a skinless, eyeless, humanoid creature leaps out from the water and grabs hold of you, prompting the game to command you press the right and left triggers in rapid succession to repel the monster. After this little Quick Time Event is done, the dog runs ahead of you to the mouth of a cave. You cross the pond to follow him, ending the first chapter – three minutes into the five-chapter game.

To be fair, this introductory chapter is the shortest, though not by much. It serves as a tutorial for the platforming and combat mechanics, but also does a fantastic job of establishing the bleak and vacuous limbo setting. Most of the scenery is barren rockscape, occasionally decorated with degraded architecture, but it’s all moulded in such a way as to never feel samey or repetitive. The music is credited to developer Juan-Mod, with sound effects taken from Epic’s Unreal library; Juan-Mod’s use of fog and lighting, combined with the beautiful and bleak score, make for an immersive journey. The enemy animation is well done too, in the brief and violent snippets you see them, though the dog’s animations are considerably more stilted (luckily, you seldom see the pooch in motion). The game is entirely first-person, and your avatar will occasionally raise their hands in response to something transpiring in the environment, adding a nice sense of drama to the otherwise mute reactions.

Shines Over: The Damned

Genre:	Horror
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Psychological
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Photorealism
Gameplay:	Action-Adventure, Survival
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Action:	Quick Time Events, Platforming
Difficulty:	Low

The story progresses little from the first chapter to the closing credits, being purposefully ambiguous. Each new area you enter is presented with a subtitle, like the introductory chapter’s "Wasteland Road," or the concluding chapter’s "The Gorge," giving you some sense of a map progression through this underworld. There is an underlying narrative regarding a woman entombed within some sort of glowing rock or resin, and the cutaways to these cinematics are just as shocking as the attacks from enemies, though there’s little closure or revelation in these cutscenes. In the end, it’s hard to discern what the point of it all was, but the imagery and environments are striking enough to still imprint a sense of wonder as to the greater world and its characters.

Though the protagonist’s motivation is vague at best, Shines Over does at least offer up different gameplay challenges in each of its five chapters to keep you engaged. The second chapter focuses on platforming, and is the most frustrating sequence in the game, leading to many restarts (at nearby checkpoints, mind you) after failed leaps between floating platforms. The third chapter focuses on exploration, tasking you with gathering eight glowing orbs (barely) hidden within the level, though their collection is entirely optional, too. This chapter ends with a brief puzzle requiring you to input a code of symbols to open a door that leads to the fourth chapter. Here the setting moves from rockscape to an abandoned village, complete with moving traps that require little more than a quick sprint or side-step to avoid. The game ends with a boating sequence, tasking you with rowing left or right on fixed lanes, Temple Run style, down a river, avoiding obstacles and collecting more (optional) blue orbs.

The controls are serviceable, save for the aforementioned platforming, where your avatar feels a bit too heavy and stilted for even the minor athletic feats demanded of them. On PlayStation 5, the DualSense is put to great use via both the rumble and audio feedback, which, alongside the well-animated creatures, made me jump with fright on several occasions. Though the game is quite short, there are trophies for completing chapters under criteria like not dying or collecting a certain number of orbs, should you feel inclined to replay it. 

Final Verdict

Ultimately, Shines Over: The Damned is a functional video game with diverse challenges, but due to its lack of direction and short runtime, it ends up feeling rudimentary and trivial. The platforming, combat, rowing, and puzzle sequences are simplistic and underdeveloped. A dedication in the credits suggests this may have been a work of intimate personal meaning. That’s commendable, but as a commercial release the game is basically just a tech demo of what you can make in the Unreal engine. There is an interesting story buried somewhere in here, but it’s so indecipherable that it is literally devoid of all meaning. The choreography of horror sequences is thrilling, but in the end there isn’t much of a cohesive gaming experience. Hardcore thriller fans looking for a quick snack may find limited enjoyment in Shines Over, but for even moderate adventure fans, there just isn’t enough to engage or challenge in the slightest.

Drew played Shines Over: The Damned on PlayStation 5 using a review code provided by the game's publisher.