At its core, Pine Harbor is an incredibly simple game: it melds mechanics that would be more at home in a genre like survival or even extraction shooters with a heavy dose of horror-based tension for its core gameplay loop. As the game’s description on Steam will aptly tell you, the entire gameplay loop revolves around scavenging for supplies and materials during the day, which in turn will help you out with surviving the following night. And while this core gameplay loop always exists in the background, there’s also a story that tries to give players more structure with how they go about achieving their goals.

"Shortly after getting separated from Richard, it’s up to the players to try and figure out what kind of mysterious secret he was uncovering, and why a corporation might want to shut him up."

The setup is rather simple: Pine Harbor is a small town where some sort of accident caused a factory to blow up. This, for some reason, has essentially caused the town to become infected with zombie-like enemies all over the place, in turn leading the town to get abandoned by most of its regular populace. Players take on the role of Josh, who hitches a bus ride to the eponymous town at the seeming behest of his father. Shortly after meeting his father, Richard, Josh discovers that the letter wasn’t sent by him, and that darker forces, and maybe even a conspiracy might be at play.

Shortly after getting separated from Richard, it’s up to the players to try and figure out what kind of mysterious secret he was uncovering, and why a corporation might want to shut him up. It also doesn’t help that the zombie-like skinners also seem hellbent on taking him, and by extension, you down. Throughout the plot, you’ll be sent all over Pine Harbor on missions, ranging from looking for some supplies for some fellow surviving humans that might be looking forward to escaping, to following the cryptic instructions left behind by your father.

Generally speaking, Pine Harbor feels like it’s inspired quite a bit by classic survival horror titles like Silent Hill. The titular town is constantly covered in fog, which does a great job in adding to the general atmosphere of the game. The general nature of the narrative also feels like it’s lifting a page right out of Silent Hill, thanks to its creepy atmosphere, weird-looking enemies, and strange-acting NPCs.

"Pine Harbor feels like it’s inspired quite a bit by classic survival horror titles like Silent Hill"

Interestingly, the NPCs behaving strangely might actually be the result of the game still being in Early Access. Right from the get go, it’s quite evident there’s still a lot of work left to be done on Pine Harbor. Among other things, just about every animation in the whole game feels incredibly stiff, with some standout examples being Richard being incredibly still while talking to you in a moving car, or how enemies generally tend to behave. The generally strange behavior of the NPCs also goes beyond just stiff animations, and crosses right over into the bad voice acting category.

Most quests tend to have you running between two distant parts of the town on simple fetch quests, and sometimes taking on some enemies along the way. While this has the great effect of getting you intimately familiar with the town over a long period of play, unfortunately, this also has the side-effect of making the game feel incredibly repetitive. The quests needed a lot more variety in them than just simply being sent to a building on the other side of town to either talk to a survivor, or to find some supplies that you then have to bring all the way back.

While the core structure of Pine Harbor shows that a fun game might be somewhere in there, just about everything else throughout your time with the title will prove to be tedious, frustrating, or outright boring. For example, there isn’t really much in the way of combat options when it comes to dealing with enemies. You either shoot them if you have a gun, or you keep spamming a basic melee attack until they go down. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that enemies don’t really tend to react in any interesting way to your actions, aside from coming to you when they hear you getting close. This isn’t, for example, like Resident Evil where you have a ton of options in combat by choosing to shoot different body parts on zombies. Rather, all you can really do to deal with them is keep spamming left click and wait for them to eventually go down.

"You either shoot them if you have a gun, or you keep spamming a basic melee attack until they go down."

Pine Harbor quite obviously still has a long road ahead of it, and in its current state, keeping it in Early Access is definitely the right call. While the background setting is pretty interesting, the main story is bland because of the lack of quality voice acting or even decent writing. NPC characters will often act like they’re either students acting on stage for the first time, or aliens that are failing miserably in their attempts to sound like actual human beings. Couple that with the fact that the gameplay is pretty boring, and the missions are just simple fetch quests, and there really isn’t much here.

The game really starts to come alive at night, when you’re shacked up in your house and have to make some decisions about how you’re going to deal with skinners that will be gunning straight for your head. Unfortunately, the bad enemy AI rears its ugly head once again, and you never really have to employ much in the way of strategy aside from finding a good place to hide and having plenty of ammo to survive the night.

Somewhere inside Pine Harbor, there is an intriguing game. The fact that it’s an Early Access release also means that there’s nowhere for the game’s quality to go but up. The foundations are decent, and the general vibes of the game is pretty spot-on when it comes to instilling a sense of horror in the player. Unfortunately, the roughness around the edges, the lack of any real combat options, bland quests, and terrible voice acting hold the game back quite a bit.

As it currently stands, Pine Harbor isn’t really worth your time, even if you are a horror fan. There are a few good ideas there, however, and with time, there are definitely hopes that it goes on to become a decent addition to the horror genre.

This game was reviewed on PC.

This feature series is dedicated to putting a spotlight on some of these upcoming projects, and today we will be looking at Pine Harbor. It’s a survival horror game that might not bring something revolutionary to the table, but it’s looking like a mostly solid experience and one that should be on every survival horror fan’s radar.

Vision Forge Team is the development studio behind Pine Harbor, and this is the studio’s debut title. As you can obviously guess by now – it’s a pretty ambitious project which is all the more surprising once you consider that it’s all being made by a small team of developers. Of course, the team is really passionate about this project, and from what we have seen so far – the team does seem to have a great understanding of what exactly makes a survival horror game tick.

Coming back to the game itself, Pine Harbor takes place in a remote fishing town on the shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. The town itself is surrounded by steep cliffs and dense forests, which separates it from the rest of the settlements. A situation has struck this town which has turned the majority of the town’s residents into mindless husks who hunt for anyone unaffected by this massacre, while the remaining citizens continue to cower in fear of these hulking beasts roaming the town. As the protagonist of this tale, your job is to explore these desolate environments and become the hero of Pine Harbor as you try to dig deep and uncover the many secrets that led to this disaster, and ultimately find out if all of this reckoning can be undone.

The story looks to be simplistic in its scope, and the narrative setup borrows familiar elements from genre contemporaries. Of course, it isn’t anything surprising considering that the game has cited Resident Evil and Silent Hill as its inspirations. That said, we do hope that the game does the needful when it comes to crafting a story with memorable plot revelations and characters that evolve over the course of the journey.

Moving over to the gameplay side of things, it’s evident that a lot of effort and resources went into creating a gameplay loop that seems like it is going to be consistently engaging. As you can observe in the gameplay footage, the game is played in the first-person perspective which will make for an intimate experience. The moment to moment gameplay loop will revolve around exploring these environments and overcoming the many threats that lie in your path as you try to reach the bottom of this mystery.

Having a compelling atmosphere is one of the most important aspects of any great survival horror experience, and Pine Harbor excels in creating an ominous vibe that’s sure to make you uneasy in the bones. The game makes great use of thick fog to mask detail in distant areas and play on the fear of the unknown, which is also a clever nod to its inspirations from Konami’s Silent Hill. Apart from that, the abandoned houses and other surrounding areas are mostly dimly lit with cramped indoors and dusty set props that make tiptoeing around these environments a constantly frightening experience.

Resources are obviously going to be scarce, so you will have to be really wise and thoughtful when it comes to choosing which fights to take and when to pull back and save up on precious ammunition. The combat is rather simplistic with you having access to common weapon types like handguns or shotguns, but Pine Harbor seems to keep players on their toes through the use of excellent enemy placement. As can be seen from the available gameplay snippets, there are many instances where enemies lie waiting around blind corners and other unassuming spots – ready to punish anyone who hasn’t properly checked their corners.

There are more than one instances in the available gameplay footage where the player finds an enemy approaching them and turns around to find another trapping them from both sides. Such encounters definitely look terrifying to witness in first person, and things will only intensify as the night approaches. Players will have to find shelter in indoor locations like abandoned homes or warehouses where resources are relatively plentiful and use them in a judicial manner to face the many enemies that will come in waves.

On the topic of enemies, we have only seen a couple of enemy types in the gameplay trailers – so we’re expecting that the final release will have a lot more variety. And as you can probably observe in the trailers, enemies in Pine Harbor go down rather easily; common enemies take only a couple of shots from the regular pistol before they get neutralized. As such, the team might have to rebalance the combat to keep it more interesting and add a bit of challenge to the whole affair as well.

Switching gears over to the visuals, we have to say that Pine Harbor looks really beautiful. Vision Forge Team is making use of Unreal Engine 5, and the graphical features of this engine have been put to great use in this project. The game punches well above its weight in terms of production quality, and everything from the asset work to the animations and enemy designs looks impressive. There’s generous use of volumetric fog in the environments as mentioned previously, and it’s appropriately dense and reactive to other elements. Furthermore, the lighting implementation is also equally fantastic – and it does a lot of the heavy lifting in bringing this scary world to life.

Over on the release front, Pine Harbor is currently slated to release in Q4 2023 for PC. At the risk of sounding like a pessimist, it seems pretty likely that the game will end up getting pushed to next year since we’re already two quarters into 2023 and we still have no concrete release date and little in the name of marketing or promotion surrounding this otherwise promising game. Also, no console ports are planned as of yet, but it’s pretty likely that the game might end up on these platforms if it garners enough success at launch.

But all that does very little to dim the excitement that we have for Pine Harbor. Vision Forge Team seems to be on the right path with this project, and it definitely has the potential to be one of the biggest surprise hits of the near future. The stage has been set, and all that remains for the developer is to take these impressive concepts and reach the finish line without any compromises. We really hope that Pine Harbor ends up surpassing expectations and anticipation from fans, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed until then.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.