"Scorn" Review - 2022's Biggest Letdown

Available for: Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

There's a type of game that I dream about sometimes, one that I've always wanted to see happen. The idea is impenetrable, unsettling atmosphere in a world as bleak as it gets, whether in the depressing sense or horrifying sense. There's no dialogue in this dream game, and whatever form gameplay takes, it's all in service of this impenetrable atmosphere. For years, the game that was closest to replicating this style was PlayDead's Inside, which only fumbled in its tone-crashing ending. With all of that said, perhaps you can already see why I was looking forward to Scorn ever since I heard about it. Even a brief look at the concept and the trailers shows you pretty much exactly what I laid out in that description. I had heard all the reviews saying the combat was bad and there were some technical woes, but I was willing to brave that kind of thing, so promising was Scorn. Now, having finished the game, I can say this for certain: Scorn is, without a doubt, exactly the kind of game I've wanted for about as long as I've been a gamer. However, as the subtitle of this review implies, the game is so held back by so many frustrations that said frustrations ultimately overshadow almost everything else, rendering what could have easily been one of my favorite games of all time into a sometime barely playable farce. While not exactly a bad game, and while it's a game I'll probably come back to in the future to soak up more hidden meanings and lore from, Scorn is nonetheless an overall letdown.

The first thing you're likely to notice about Scorn is its impeccable art direction. Largely based off the works of H.R. Giger (known for inventing the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise), this game's environments, assets, npcs, technologies, everything you can think of is an unsettling marriage between flesh and metal...and also everything in the world is somehow symbolic of reproduction in some sense. For every machine you come across, there's some fleshy component to make it disturbing, and for every remotely humanoid creature you come across (including yourself), there's some level of crude machinery incorporated to call into question that very word: humanoid. And as for that reproductive asset, just about every interaction you have with this world revolves around insertion and/or extraction. You'll open doors by walking up to a panel, putting each of your fingers into a series of fleshy holes that serve as grips before pulling the grips down. You'll free a creature by violently sawing away a fleshy cocoon until it falls out, blood dripping from behind it. Little robots will fly to various ovary-esque pods in the environment and "spray" them. Hell, your primary weapon is a poking stick that you attack with by making it extend and retract swiftly. And before you accuse me of reaching here, Giger was/is known for these themes being prevalent in his work, and I'm far from the first reviewer to point out examples like these in this game! But I digress. This art direction is made even stronger by Scorn's atmosphere, overall creep factor, and truly inventive body horror. There's no dialogue, no map, no instructions, and nothing to read in this game, so you have to figure literally everything out for yourself. This brings about some serious "fear of the unknown" effect. For example, you might see a machine and it's clear that you have to stick your arm in it...but what's going to happen to your arm if you use it? For another example, you might wheel a defenseless, pathetic, trapped little humanoid creature mewling for help down to a horrific-looking machine and have him strapped in to it. You know you need to put him in this machine in order to progress, but you're not sure how this is going to help. Then as you activate the machine, you see a circular saw fire up and by this point it's impossible to change course. Every new thing you see is a potential new horrible thing to witness, but you have no choice but to engage with it directly, because the game give you any hints. Much like Amnesia: The Dark Descent's torture chamber levels, this causes fear or unsettlement not through traditional means, but by forced familiarity. In that aforementioned game, you never see anyone get tortured or even hear it. Rather, you're forced into familiarity by simply having to listen to the sound a device would make. No screaming or anything, just the sound an instrument of pain would make as it was utilized. In a similar vein, just about every interaction in Scorn forces you into familiarity strictly because of your lack of knowledge beforehand. If you want to proceed, you have to become aware of exactly how any thing you see might hurt you, and how you might have to use these devices to solve a puzzle. Make no mistake, dear reader, these things are the draw of Scorn, so if you aren't on board for a slow burn, deeply unsettling atmospheric ride through a world like this, this isn't for you. The dream game I brought up in the introduction ideally wouldn't be as gory as this (in the last chapter, I literally thought I was going to throw up for a little while). But if you're like me and this kind of absolutely overbearing bleak atmosphere is your kind of thing (and you can stomach some....really, really innovative body horror), I think you'll find something to like...but unfortunately, this isn't all there is to the game.

Unfortunately, there's one major drawback to all of this good stuff, and that's the combat. Most of the game's runtime is spent on puzzles, but there's a large swath of time during the middle of the game where you actually get weapons and have to fight some enemies. Critics have called this gameplay bad, I'd go a step further and say it's the worst gameplay I've ever experienced in my life. Literally. I'm not being hyperbolic, Scorn has THE WORST gameplay I've ever experienced in my life. I didn't need combat at all in this game. Hell, I didn't even necessarily need GOOD combat in this game. But what we have here is so bad that at times, it renders the game almost literally unplayable. As I already mentioned, your primary weapon is a poking stick gun, and the thing about this gun is that you can jab twice, and then you have to wait a little bit for the gun to recharge (oh, look, another reference to reproduction). The basic enemies that you fight take 5 stabs before they die. So assuming that you hit every time you shoot at them (which isn't likely, given how clunky the aiming is and how impossible it is to tell how far the gun can reach), you'll hit one of these enemies twice, try to avoid their attacks until the gun recharges, hit them twice again, try to avoid the attacks again, then hit them one more time. It's worth noting that there isn't a dodge or anything and you can't sprint from left to right, so when you're in defensive mode, you just have to hope and pray that you slowly move in the correct direction in time to avoid an attack. Another enemy type only takes 2 hits but has picture perfect aim, another type also takes two hits but moves more erratically, and one type can probably take a million hits because it takes two to three shots from the in-game shotgun you get later on. That's if you meet one of these enemies at a time. Sometimes you'll have to face an entire loadout! What's more, ammo and health restoration bulbs are far too scarce, so you're almost always in a frustrating bind. With some enemy encounters, if you wait far away enough for a long enough time, all the enemies will go back into their holes and not be a problem, but that's not any more fun. But what truly makes this game's combat as bad as it is is the checkpoint system. Until a recent patch, getting killed would send you all the way back to as long as 10 minutes ago, and to add insult to injury, these checkpoints save your current amount of health and ammo. That's par for the course, but what if you have only one hit of health remaining and no ammo when you reach a checkpoint? It means you will literally die in one hit from now until the next checkpoint, which is god knows how far away. What this means in practice is that more than once in this game, you'll just be sprinting through enemies, zigzagging to try and avoid projectiles if you can, and more often than not, you'll end up getting hit and die instantly, leaving you to do that 10 minute gauntlet run once again. That was my experience, anyway, before I put Scorn down, having decided it was literally unplayable at that point. However, as I said, a patch came out recently that somewhat helps with the checkpoints. I don't know how much was actually altered, but with this change, I was able to power through and finish Scorn the exact same night, even having died a couple times. The designs of the guns and everything is absolutely fascinating, but this large period of time where enemies were around was easily the most incompetently designed stretch of gameplay I've ever seen. 

In terms of the technical side of things, Scorn is a bit of a mixed bag, but it's mostly positive. Let's get the negatives out of the way first. Remember how I said I felt like I was gonna throw up during the game's final act? Well, that wasn't just the body horror. The game's FOV is well and truly bonked by design, to force intimacy with the world and make you feel uncomfortable. But for story reasons, the character you play as walks in a different way in the last stretch of the game, and that movement style combined with the FOV gave me some motion sickness, which wasn't helped by what was going on on-screen. Furthermore, your character has a tendency to get stuck on geometry at key moments (like when sprinting through enemies). And I already mentioned the checkpoint system in the gameplay portion, but that's actually a major technical issue, not a gameplay problem, so it deserves a note here as well. But literally everything else about Scorn is top-tier stuff. The textures never fail to load in, the framerate never drops, no audio/video/animation glitches ever occur, and I've never had the game crash. Atmosphere like this lives or dies on its overall technical quality, and everything from the sound design to even technical negatives like that FOV problem do their jobs. Special attention must be given to this game's sparse but phenomenal soundtrack, which sells every location you find yourself in. A sustained bass note both thunderous in tone but soft in volume, a handful of whispers in the back of your ear, every soundscape is crafted specifically to get the most out of the environment's theme,

Folks, Scorn is one of those rare games that really and truly tells you if you want it just by existing. If you watch a trailer and feel like you're gonna puke, it isn't for you, because I can guarantee you it gets worse. If you look at the combat and think that's gonna be a hard limit for you, you're probably right. And sadly, even if you're like me and you absolutely love every minute of the game that isn't spent in combat, that time that you do spend in combat is gonna linger over your memories as if it were more traumatic that the actual things you see happen in this game. I thoroughly loved Scorn when it was being what it promised to be, and despite the score I give it, I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow wormed its way onto the final GOTY list because of how much it clicks with me when it gets it right. But that bit of praise must nonetheless be accompanied by the caveat that while I enjoyed it, it is 2022's biggest letdown, bar none. This being a smaller scale game, I'll be using the edited score standards, where a maximum of 2 points can be taken off for any one negative, rather than the usual 1 point. 

Let us review:

Literally worst combat ever - 2.0

Horrific checkpoint system - 2.0

Smaller technical qualms - 0.5

The final score for Scorn is...

5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average

Please do better, Ebb Software, please do better.