During my Signalis review, I stated that we live in a golden age for horror games. Great entries in the genre such as MADiSON and Amnesia The Bunker provide stunning and terrifying horror experiences for players. Even Silent Hill The Short Message, despite its many problems, still has some good ideas. Flawed as it is, it tries to bring the franchise back to past glory with some thought-provoking themes. Shines Over: The Damned is also a short and experimental first-person horror title… which is also terrible, and absolutely not worth your time.

You play as someone who follows a dog somewhere after the good boy had lost his owner. Following the dog, you are thrown into a completely barren plot. But unlike more abstract games such as Scorn, or the fantastic Devotion, which tried to tell some compelling stories, Shines Over: The Damned doesn’t even try. There is a very vague semblance of an overarching narrative, with some cutscenes that try to hint at what’s going on, but that is about it. I wouldn’t even suggest trying to look much further into what’s happening, since that would mean you spent more time thinking about the narrative than its developers.

Even if a horror game fails on a compelling premise, then there’s still a slight chance for it to be saved if it can deliver in the actual horror side of things (its scares, its unsettling nature). What is promised is a tense and atmospheric horror game. What we have, however, is an absolute slog of mismatched ideas that can’t stick to a concept for more than five minutes at a time. The game starts as a simple walking simulator, which is innocent enough, but when it comes to delivering the scares, this game falls flat.

A lot of the attempts at horror are just simple jumpscares, whenever one of the few monsters jump at you. When this happens, just spam the L1 + R1 buttons, and that’s about it. Shines Over: The Damned will throw these at you every few minutes in order to keep you on your toes, but it’s underwhelming to say the least. There isn’t even an intense atmosphere to the game, just dimly lit areas and creatures that jump at you.

For some reason, Shines Over: The Damned constantly tries to switch up its gameplay at an alarming pace. From out of nowhere, it decides to become a platformer, making me jump from one invisible platform to another, and revealing a path through some weird sequences. I had to endure annoying and imprecise controls, and on multiple occasions I’d be thrown off to a random direction. After this schizophrenic section, you’ll have to endure another non-scary walking simulator section, with just a few basic puzzles and the occasional QTE. Finally, an infuriatingly long boat ride with little input or interaction besides moving left and right. In this case, even Skull and Bones managed to deliver a better experience.

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned that Shines Over: The Damned only clocks in at about half an hour, maybe a little longer if you decide to go for that platinum trophy. Whilst it sounds like this is cramming in a lot for its runtime, it really isn’t, as it all just boils down to moving forward, requiring very little thought. If you quit out for whatever reason (for me getting absolutely bored of the long boat ride), then it’s right back to the beginning of the game. For the asking price of sixteen dollars, this amount of content would be almost impossible to justify, even if it were a fantastic experience.

This basic design extends to the sound and visuals. Shines Over: The Damned just looks… passable, there’s nothing really interesting of note to see as the creatures don’t look very threatening, environments are very basic and nothing looks like it quite fits into place. Its framerate also isn’t very good, with frequent drops regardless of nothing really happening onscreen. Sound is often also played through the DualSense controller for some reason. Whenever you die there’s a hilarious squelch noise and with no in-game options menu, so you can’t really set that sound to go anywhere else. This is the same for jumpscares and whenever you take damage. Outside of the weird implementation of DualSense controller, there’s nothing to note in the sound department.

If it wasn’t clear already, Shines Over: The Damned is a really bad game, which isn’t worth your money or your time, even if it lasts just half an hour. It’s a short, but definitely not sweet experience, completely lacking in scares, story, atmosphere, or inventive ideas. To make matters worse, it costs way too much for something so short. The easy platinum trophy you can get from it is not worth the price tag. At its worst, it was a frustrating gameplay experience. At its best, it is an experimental snorefest.

 

Graphics: 3.0 Some attempts at trippy imagery, but at the end of the day, Shines Over just looks completely unremarkable.	Gameplay: 1.0 It switches up its gameplay schemes constantly, with some terrible platforming sections at times, and some poor horror sections in other moments. It’s plain and boring no matter the genre, though.
Sound: 1.0 Excessively bad use of the DualSense speakers and some terrible sound design in general.	Fun Factor: 0.5 In its very short, barely twenty minute-long run time, I failed to think about a single redeeming quality in this game. It’s just plain bad.
Final Verdict: 1.5

Shines Over: The Damned is available now on PlayStation 5.

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.

A copy of Shines Over: The Damned was provided by the publisher.