Say it in Red | Episode 45: Love Shore

Say It In Red

Consider the city of our Future, the hyperconnectivity of high rise corporate data centers and the grungiest retrofitted back alley """studio""" apartments you can imagine. A city which, in many ways, resembles a shining new PC case fitted around a collage of older parts ranging from a smoke and dirt encrusted motherboard to the newest GPU that barely hums under the strain of eight hour video renders. Would you enjoy your life there, in a cyberpunk city where we carry on all the problems of the modern day and amplify them with new and exciting dangers and complexities? Would you be content, waking up in Love Shore each morning, even if you weren't fully human?
This month, Sara and Runa cover the recently released Love Shore (2023), a queer dating sim centered around two protagonists: Sam and Farah. We meet them both as they're finishing a prison sentence, but prison is a very different thing for them — they're S.Humans, after all, and rather than being confined to a cell with a thin bunk and toilet they're instead frozen in an induced state of paralysis as their mechanical bodies are rendered inactive... and their minds left to wander for two agonizing years. When they return to Love Shore, their old lives and old flames are waiting for them. Farah immediately finds her best friend, Talia, then a friendly bartender Maya, and on her way out of the hospital crosses paths with Jo, a mysterious investigator and spyware salesperson. At the end of the night though, she's greeted by a voicemail from her old doctor, Imani, who urgently pleads with Farah to find her and help her as quickly as she can. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up to his friend and former driver, Vivian, rapping at his door. After she leaves him with coffee and a welcome back to the city, Sam instantly trips back into his ex, Aziz, and then later his former co-worker Conrad. At the end of the night though, Sam hears a commotion in the shop where he works and finds a mysterious and beautiful man, Alyosha, shot through the chest and bleeding on the floor. These relationships will pull Farah and Sam into different intrigues and plots coursing through the lifeblood of Love Shore, and possibly into conflict with one another. Whether they find romance, friendship, abandonment, or death, they'll do so in the shadow of the city's bright neon lights and, often, the gaze of literal Gods walking among them.
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