Pine Harbor Review (PC)

Silent Hill; Ghostwire Tokyo; Those Who Remain; and perhaps even Happy Humble Burger Farm, for crying out loud. What do all of these have in common? Fog. And not just any old fog, but a deeply disturbing and oddly ominous blanket of darkness that make even the most vibrant textures bleed out from the shadows. Needless to say that, setting-wise, it’s something that we’ve seen a dozen or so times before, which of course makes Vision Forge Team’s latest horror chapter, Pine Harbor, seem almost too familiar—so much, that entering it feels like returning home after a long and grueling slumber aboard some subsidiary vessel.

Pine Harbor, in case you missed the memo, is a first-person horror game in which you tackle the tainted waters of an old fishing village—a former bastion of pride amongst the locals which ultimately fell due to an overarching “technological” disaster. As a result of said disaster, the so-called Pine Harbor has become a rather unsettling place to call home, and as for its inhabitants? Well, let’s just say they’ve become a little worse for wear since the outbreak. It’s a damn shame, then, that you have to explore it, and figure out what on earth took shape in the immediate aftermath of its downfall. No pressure.

At the time of writing, Pine Harbor is only just about working through its early access markers, and so, if you are interested in picking it up ahead of its formal release, then be sure to read on for a few pre-purchase pointers. Here’s everything you should know about Pine Harbor and its cabinet of curiosities, warts and all…

Into the Smoke…

Pine Harbor immediately throws you into the thick of a once-loved haven for local fishermen and townsfolk alike, asking only that you “find your father”—a task that involves carving deep into the residential and wooded biomes of the town, and plucking its quarters clean of all their secrets and questionable histories. In this world, you don’t quite know where you’re going, let alone what you’re looking for, other than the faint outline of another prominent figure who harbors a seat in your network. With this, sadly, comes a rather drawn-out passage that sees you exploring the opaque boroughs of a world engulfed in darkness and a cycle that, while frequently illuminated, is predominantly dim and ludicrously dainty. And that, unfortunately, is where the first obstacle comes in: finding the next waypoint that has the potential to usher in a new story beat.

Pine Harbor provides a traditional day-and-night cycle that consists of two halves; the morning sees you exploring certain areas and completing whatever objectives you can in the allotted time; the nighttime, on the other hand, pits you against the twisted and nightmarish corners of the same streets, only with the addition of unnatural beings that are oddly hungry for blood and vengeance. It’s your role, in short, to navigate this daily cycle, and manage your time carefully as you maneuver from one location to the next whilst staying clear of the radar. Easier said than done, mind you.

To put you in the picture — things in Pine Harbor tend to go awfully wrong at night, and your father, an inventor by trade, who also apparently “never” sent you a letter asking for you to visit him, has something to do with it. Naturally, this is where you begin your journey: on the front doorstep to Pine Harbor.

Finding Your Way

The good news is that there is, thankfully, a map in Pine Harbor, which means that you can, provided that you have a vague understanding of what’s happening around you, navigate a lot of the world without resorting to dumb luck and aimless travel. Saying that, the game does rely on your ability to venture away from the beaten track and uncover a lot of the secrets of the world for yourself—a relatively mundane trial that can often take far longer than necessary, depending on the location of the next chapter or item of interest. But that’s half the fun — or at least, it’s supposed to be; the lack of hours in the day, however, make a lot of this somewhat difficult to do. And let me tell you, you do not want to be roaming around during the twilight hours, as it’s essentially a one-way ticket to death.

Pine Harbor is all about being able to find balance between objectives, as well as depend on your ability to operate beneath the cover of darkness and somehow find the correct path that ushers you forward. I’ll be honest, this isn’t always the easiest thing to do, as the game often fails to tell what it is you’re even doing, let alone which locations on the map are even worth exploring. And for when you do manage to find your way, it’s often that you wind up finding a locked door that requires some kind of intricate mechanism to unlock. Failing to crack the code in a timely manner can, and ultimately will, result in the mutated creatures fleeing from their resting spots and hunting you down—a climax that essentially leads to an instant rewind. Not fun.

Bats & Bruises

There are two weak points in Pine Harbor: the combat, which is mostly comprised of bashing a creature in the head with a baseball bat and watching them react with the same half-baked arm-to-face gesture until they fall; and the dialogue, which is, without doubt, some of the worst I’ve heard in quite some time. Don’t get me wrong, the script isn’t half bad, but the actual voice acting is dreadful, to the point of making me question whether or not it was live recordings replaying back to me, or some form of AI-generated material. Kaya, for example, is a character that you meet relatively early on in the story, and is someone who speaks to you as if you’re an extraterrestrial being in unchartered waters. It’s clunky, is what I’m saying, and it definitely spoils a lot of the experience.

From a visual standpoint, Pine Harbor is, in my honest opinion, a very, very good-looking game — and that’s saying something, seeing as a lot of its key locations tend to hide behind a great deal of smoke and mist. With that said, while I did notice that a lot of finer details were hard to knuckle in on, I did notice that other elements—the character design and faces, for example—were surprisingly good, albeit a little jittery. But again, these are minor things that could, in all fairness, fix themselves in future hot fixes and free DLC.

Verdict

I’m willing to give Pine Harbor the benefit of the doubt and say that, as it is indeed in its early access phase, a few technical issues are expected, and thus, unlikely to impact the overall score of the full game. With that said, as this is a review of the current version of the game, there are several issues that I almost feel the need to address, including its lack of in-game support and questionably unfair gameplay aspects—the AI-controlled enemy spawning routine, being one of the most frustrating features of the bunch. But again, as several of these tedious tidbits are more than likely capable of fixing themselves in a post-launch update or two, I really can’t complain all that much.

Technical issues cast aside for a moment, Pine Harbor does, in all fairness, host a genuinely gripping atmosphere and, not to mention, a wide range of great character designs, few of which have enough depth to warrant an ear or two for the several hours that it keeps you around for. Sure, it isn’t the scariest game out there, but it does bring a certain sense of creepiness to its mix, and it does a surprisingly good job of applying an unsettling sense of urgency to its rather harsh day-and-night cycle, too.

To answer the initial question of whether or not Pine Harbor is worth playing — yes, it is, but only if you’re able to gloss over a slew of technical flaws and focus on the positives, at least until its creators have successfully managed to iron out the last-remaining creases and develop a product that’s both structurally sound and technologically appealing. It isn’t quite there yet, but honestly, I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t have the potential to be the next Silent Hill.