Five Years of The Shore: From Ulule to PlayStation 5
The Shore reached PlayStation 5 on 30 April 2026, five years and two months after it came out on Steam. The road there ran through a crowdfunding campaign, a grant from Epic Games, a virtual reality spin-off and a publishing deal in Athens. This is that road, dated and in order.
2019: one person, one engine
Ares Dragonis started The Shore in early 2019 as a way to learn Unreal Engine. He was its designer, its 3D artist, its creature maker and its director, and for eleven months he was also its entire team. Programmer Adonis Brosteanu and composer Thanos Zampoukas joined after that first year. Brandon Fague later gave Andrew his voice.
2020: the demo, Ulule and Epic
A free demo came out in July 2020 on Steam and itch.io. Horror sites noticed. Dread Central wrote: “I really cannot overstate how cool The Shore is.”
That August the studio ran a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule to pay for the story mode. It asked for EUR 4,000 and closed at EUR 4,855, from 162 backers. Around the same time Epic Games awarded The Shore an Epic MegaGrant, the fund it uses to back projects built in Unreal Engine.
2021: release
The Shore launched on Steam for Windows on 19 February 2021, and on GOG in October. Within days a patch raised frame rates sharply, from around 60 to around 130 on the same hardware according to the studio’s own update notes, and in March came support for Razer Chroma lighting.
Reviewers split on the puzzles and agreed on the look and sound. Critical Hit called it “a dark indie pearl worth a five-hour dive”. Players were kinder than the critics: today the Steam page shows “Mostly Positive”, 72% of more than 2,000 reviews. In 2023 the campaign behind the game won Best Marketing of the Year at the Hellenic Game Awards (HEGA), and Gameworld.gr readers voted The Shore their Best Game of the Year.
2022: VR, an anniversary, the Steam Deck
The Shore VR arrived on Steam in early 2022. It is not a port: it is a new chapter set after the events of the game, built for headsets and tracked controllers. A month later an anniversary patch added a hidden event and a larger underwater area to the original. Steam Deck support followed in March, and a photo mode in June.
2023 to 2025: new games
Dragonis Games moved on to Eresys, a co-op Lovecraftian horror game for up to four players, in 2023, and to Necrophosis, a world of bone and rust after the painter Zdzislaw Beksinski, in 2025. The Shore kept selling.
2026: consoles
In February 2026, five years to the day after the PC launch, the studio announced The Shore: Enhanced Edition for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, published by Iphigames of Athens. Xbox Wire carried the Xbox announcement on 2 March. The PS5 version launched on 30 April. CogConnected called it “the most complete and refined version of the game so far”.
On 28 May the game reached shelves too: the physical PS5 edition of Necrophosis: Full Consciousness, from publisher PQube, includes The Shore: Enhanced Edition as a bonus game. In September the players of IndiePump.space voted it their indie game of the month. The Xbox Series X|S release is due later in 2026.
What stayed the same
Across five years and three kinds of hardware, the island did not change much. It is still the one Ares built alone in 2019: the lighthouse, the wrecks, the carved faces at the waterline, and the things that come out of the sea. The Enhanced Edition is the same story, adapted for consoles.
Release dates, ratings and the physical edition are on the Enhanced Edition page. The full team is on the about page.
