Scorn... I so much wanted to like Scorn more than I do. It just isn't a very good game, which is a crying shame. It is one of the most stunning-looking horror games I've ever seen, building its fantastically macabre visuals upon the works of H.R. Giger. It's a game set in a dying, decaying bio-mechanical world, where everything, including you, is wholly alien. Twisted and sick, dying in some sickness that has left swathes of cadavers in the crumbling ruins where only monsters dwell.
Slowly, you wander through the world, looking for something. What that something is is not explained, so perhaps both you, the player, and you, the character, are just as unaware of what that something is. All you know is that you need to move forward. First, through empty corridors and halls, then through ruins overgrown with bio-mechanical waste. And then, finally, you arrive at the temple. Or a birthing palace. Or maybe it is both, a temple of procreation in an alien world. Whatever it is, you sacrifice yourself to a blade-winged angel, which connects you to a wider conscience, which tells you as little as everything else has thus far. All you know is that faceless motherly figure is finally carrying you towards somewhat solacing light, but then this redemption is stolen, and all there's left is the growing decay.
I so much wanted to like Scorn, mostly because of the aesthetics of the game. The works of H.R. Giger have been used in games before, most notably in the rather clunky horror duology Dark Seed (1 and 2), but never to this extent, where all of the game, from the environments to the characters, is so heavily, if not based, directly influenced by his macabre, surrealistic vision. Because of the art and the sound design, the game oozes atmosphere. It is, by far, one of the most atmospheric interactive pieces of horror that has been made.
But, like I said, it just isn't a good game.
Scorn shows its bad sides right from the get-go. The controls, no matter if played with a controller or keyboard and mouse, feel unresponsive and sluggish. It is too easy to be directly in front of an interactive spot and still fail to use it. And after you finally are faced with monsters you need to fight, the controls turn even worse. From shooting to reloading, all is slow and sluggish. I guess it adds an unintentional, or perhaps intentional, layer of difficulty, but that doesn't really change the fact that the combat itself is boring.
I've understood that Scorn is something of a mashup of stuff that was cobbled together after the developers were running out of money. Even if that's not the case, it very much feels like a game that was cobbled up after the devs were running dry and they just had to push out something, no matter what, to get at least something back.
This cobbled-up nature is very much present in the whole midsection of the game. The puzzles dry up and are replaced with clunky combat. The terrible autosave system makes sure that if you die, you are placed further back, so you need to slumber through the same bits and pieces again and again if you don't manage to run away. The first and the last chapters are the ones that feel the most polished, but to get to the last chapter, you need to endure the tedium of the middle section.
Scorn is not a good game. It is a macabre and, in that, a great-looking and atmospheric game, but that alone doesn't really save it from what it is. There's a minor spark of greatness in it, but that spark never manages to get any brighter than the small spark of hope in the desolate world of Scorn.
Scorn is available for consoles, and for the PC, you can get it from GOG and Steam.
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