This piece of storytelling was created for a game called Black Shore. The game is a project 9 people worked on over 3 months. It was a single-player horror game in first person. Our setting was an old harbour village, that is largely abandoned with supernatural elements. Inspired by one of the all-time greatest horror authors, I decided on a Lovecraftian setting.

The renovation of Anforth began in 1756. A British investor called Jason Shawn had a private investigator who made him aware of a rare resource in (Europe) that was traced back to a steep riff not far out in the ocean near a shore. An abandoned and degenerated fisher village sat on the edge of the island, which Shawn bought and brought back to new life. Local, nearby villages heavily criticised the construction of Anforth but in the face of superstition, the investor remained unfazed and pushed through with his project. Whilst highly profitable, Anforth didn’t finish construction until 1825, at which point Jason’s son Michael took over the company.

The intricate form of the gap, on which the resource, reminiscent of shells in the sense that they contained black pearls, caused the investor to hire engineers who designed specific underwater vehicles and diving suits for the harvest. The construction of these marvels of technology was done locally, adding an industrial side to the previously small village. Given the extensive import and export of goods from the village, it even had a connection to a railroad.

Plans on expanding the village, making it marketable for tourism, failed due to the bad reputation Anforth stood in. Underwater boats and divers disappeared mysteriously, fog hung over the village like a corpse blanket and the absence of gulls, rats and other wildlife cloaked this lonely place in unbearable silence. It got so bad, workers migrated away and the investor’s offspring, Michael, had to import British workers just to keep this “gold mine” going. So, whilst the village was built on foreign ground, it slowly lost grasp of the local culture. It had no identity. It just existed in its loneliness. Aside from these strange shells, which became a phenomenon in scientific circles, the village had fishing.

Like any resource, even those shells eventually declined. Most families were glad it did, claiming they were shells from the devil or some other evil deity. Though Anforth was the actual name, the village was known as “The Black Shore”. As the supply of those shells started to run out, the disappearance of divers and submarines became more frequent. Then, one foggy night, the monolith appeared. It emerged from the ocean, spat out like a bad omen and erected over the village like a pillar.

There was no logical explanation to justify the appearance and if ever one existed, it wasn’t a human mind that could find it. The monolith stood there, maybe 100 meters out in the ocean, beyond the cliff that fell into nothingness. It was so tall, it could be seen from any point in the city and it was so deep, that not even the submarines could see the floor it stood on. The already pressing atmosphere that clenched its iron grasp around Anforth became so much darker from that day on. The superstition, that folks were spreading behind closed doors, only had more ground to flourish upon. “The lighthouse from outside” became its title. But what was it spotting for? The following years were detrimental to the health of the city. Some swore the monolith made them see things, horrifying things. In 1856, exactly 100 years after construction began, most folks decided to leave. The supply of shells ran out, the village was uninhabitable and the nightmares that plagued the people became unbearable. Those who decided to stay, or who couldn’t afford to leave, had to suffer the consequences. The city was self-sustaining at this point, the investors dropped it long ago.

What happened in the 50 years of solitude until (Protagonist) arrived remains unknown. Yet, people still live in Anforth. Many houses are empty and some of them are ruins. Most of the population lives close to the shore, close to the monolith. Fishers from other villages claim to have spotted inhabitants driving out to the monolith at night to engage in cultic ceremonies, to have entered the monolith with sacrifices who never returned to the outside. But those are just claims by people already disregarding The Black Shore, how much truth can be to their words?…

I developed the backstory for the village first, then worked on the individual characters. Finally, I also worked on the harbour in Unreal Engine 5.  Other students designed the village, the monolith and the island, so the harbour was left for me