Video Game / Pine Harbor

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Pine Harbor is a First Person Sandbox Survival Horror game developed and published by Vision Forge Team, a team of 6 Russian indie game developers formed specifically to make the game. The game used Unreal Engine 5 to provide a level of visual quality that was noticeably high considering its indie budget. It was released on Steam Early Access on April 4th, 2024. In April 2025, all development on the game was halted and it was delisted from Steam after Vision Forge Team's founder and lead developer ran into insurmountable legal and ownership issues.

The game follows Josh Teller, who after his mother's funeral receives a letter from his estranged father Richard Teller, who walked out on the family 9 years ago, asking for Josh's forgiveness and help. Richard, a journalist, has been working on a story to expose corporate corruption surrounding the 1987 explosion of the ValChem chemical plant, which rendered the nearby town of Pine Harbor uninhabitable. Traveling to Pine Harbor, Josh meets up with his father, who says he never sent any note and that Josh was lured to Pine Harbor by ValChem to interfer with Richard's attempt to expose them. Pine Harbor is not abandoned - several families stubbornly stayed behind - and furthermore the town is infested by mutated residents who have been affected by the chemical explosion, a fact which the chemical company has been covering up. While driving through town looking for supplies, the Tellers' truck is attacked by mutants, causing it to crash. When Josh wakes up, his father is nowhere to be seen, so he must explore the town to find his father as well as more answers as to what happened to the town.

Pine Harbor contains examples of:

• Batter Up!: Once the prologue ends, Kaya gives you a baseball bat to defend yourself with as you explore the town looking for your father. It's decent in a one-on-one fight with a mutant once you learn the optimum melee strategy of letting enemies run into your swings, but you can't really use it to fight hordes, especially since swinging it burns stamina.
• Bloodsucking Bats: Besides the various humanoid mutants, the town is also inhabited by aggressive bats that fly around and bite you. They're extremely annoying, being very fast and even capable of dodging your melee swings. They only deal mild damage per hit, but inflict bleeding damage which will fully drain one of your health segments if not treated.
• Boom, Headshot!: A single headshot is generally fatal for most regular mutants, even from lower-quality handcrafted ammo for the basic pistol.
• Cliffhanger: As the game was cancelled while in Early Access, it ends on a cliffhanger after a major boss fight which is effectively the end of the game's first Act. After you defeat the old woman spider creature, your father shoots you in the back and kisses the creature lovingly. A note in your father's office mentions a "Helen" that he needs to be careful to avoid, which makes it possible he was caught and brainwashed by the spider creature.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Despite being a mutant-infested abandoned town, Pine Harbor still has a regular long distance bus route going through it - the mutants don't seem to have interfered with it, despite the end of the prologue showing they have no issue with attacking vehicles in broad daylight. It is hinted that ValChem is somehow covering up any reports of unusual events in the town, and a full-length bus is a considerably larger and more difficult target than a pickup truck. The town hotel is also somehow still up and running, though Josh does remark how surreal this is when he first finds it and talks to the owner. Tourists visiting the "abandoned town" also seem to be able to get from the bus stop to the hotel without running into mutants, at least often enough that the hotel owner has made a regular business out of sending said tourists out to be killed by said mutants so he can keep their stuff.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Time is paused while you're inside the hotel, the only building in the game that mutants can't get into, to prevent you from cheesing the game's night-time raid mechanic by hiding in the hotel all night instead.
  • Conversely, the time is always set to noon when you enter the mine tunnels searching for the missing tourists, where it will remain until you exit the tunnels. This prevents you from leaving the tunnels in the middle of the night, where it may be impossible for you to get back to town without being mobbed and killed by the much nastier night mutants. The mine tunnels are far enough out of town and away from everything else that you can't abuse this mechanic either to skip the night-time house raids.
• Fog of Doom: A thick fog perpetually hangs over the mutant-infested town.
• Hand Cannon: The .357 magnum revolver does about triple the damage of the regular M1911 Colt .45 pistol, and can be found in the roof of one of the abandoned houses on the land behind your father's house, accessible from the coastline. With standard ammo instead of handmade ammo, it kills regular mutants with a single torso shot. However, using it with handmade ammo isn't so great - with the resources it takes to craft 3 rounds of handmade .357, you can make 20 rounds of handmade .45 ACP, and with handmade rounds the magnum revolver takes 2 torso shots to kill regular mutants.
• I'm a Humanitarian: A group of miners were trapped in the nearby mine by the chemical explosion. As their food supplies began to run low, the Foreman Jeff Gluton and his enforcers began "disappearing" the other workers in order to eat them - when you find the Foreman's corpse, he's a massive Jabba the Hutt-like humanoid blob of flesh.
• Karma Houdini: Edward Vitz, the owner of the local hotel, is heavily implied to be sending out tourists (mainly campers and urban explorers) into the town and woods without warning them of the mutants, so he can steal the valuables from their luggage after they get killed. He's even possibly involved in the death of the Sole Survivor you manage to rescue, to avoid being exposed. Josh does call him out on this, but is given no option to do anything about it. An employee ID you can find in the employee locker room indicates Vitz was the hotel's janitor, and took over after the real owner/manager either died or fled.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: While mutants will attack you during the day, they get significantly nastier at night, with much tougher and faster heavily mutated variants appearing. You're quickly advised at the start of the game not to be wandering out at night but to instead board up and hunker down in your father's house.
• Protect This House: Your father's house is your refugee from the much more dangerous swarms of mutants that emerge during nighttime. Besides keeping the generator fueled to keep the lights on, you also need to find boards and metal scrap to board up the windows and doors, and fight off the attacking mutants before they can overrun the house.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Ammo, healing items, crafting items, fuel for the house's generator, etc all need to be found or crafted and must be managed carefully to survive the mutant-infested town. That said, the resource economy of the game is much closer to that of a Survival Sandbox game than a Survival Horror game, as there isn't a strict set finite amount of anything in the game world.
• Respawning Enemies: Enemies respawn around town as you explore through it, sometimes even respawning just a few dozen meters behind you in an area you just cleared half a minute ago. Fortunately, most enemies start out stationary in a semi-hibernating state, and only go after you if they detect you.
• Sense-Impaired Monster: The large mutants you encounter in the miner's quarters are extremely tough, able to withstand several pistol headshots each, but are blind and can be avoided by sneaking around them.
• Stat Overflow: You can eat canned food to increase your health beyond the maximum by one block each, up to four extra blocks, doubling your normal maximum health (though you still need to use healing items to heal any damage to your actual health). You can likewise drink water to increase your stamina the same way; helpfully, this bonus stamina regenerates just like regular stamina, and only goes away permanently after a long period of time.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The game world is relatively small, but is entirely non-linear, with you being able to explore the entire town once you finish the prologue of the game.