Abandon all hope ye who enter here – Scorn Review
If I had to choose one phrase in the English language to describe the horror adventure game Scorn, it would be: a journey into horror. There has been a ton of talk online about Swiss artist H.R. Giger's influence on Scorn’s overall design, but during the game’s brief campaign, the names of other popular artists also came to mind as influences: Clive Barker’s terrifying Hellraiser cenobites, and David Cronenberg’s use of deformed flesh in Videodrome and the oft-overlooked eXistenZ (which may be the best “video game” movie of all time).
The work created by the Serbian team at Ebb Software is gruesome, both in what is seen and for what is heard. A cacophony of moans and other unsettling noises accompanies an otherwise silent narrative. Instead, the story develops through the desperate deeds of the player character and their search for unlikely salvation against the backdrop of a desolate and monstrous world.
And yes, you read that right: The story of Scorn does not make use of any dialogue or documents to tell its tale. It simply happens as things unfold along a desperate path, one which sent me down the disturbing corridors of an enormous structure with (seemingly) alien design. I woke up in this mysterious place without understanding exactly how I had arrived there or how long I’d been there.
I was motivated by the faint hope that somewhere in this hellish construct, there could be a way out, that there may still be a normal world to return to, or that it was possible to escape from the horror that dripped from every inch of this scenario. Since the narration is purely visual, players can choose to give Scorn their own pace by moving more or less quickly, but the duration of the game itself should remain around six hours.
On the gameplay side, Scorn basically is a first-person adventure that hints at survival horror. For most of the introduction section of the game, there are no enemies or weapons; yet it is these first few hours that were the most traumatic. During the opening, I’m forced to lug around a pathetic life form that seems to have once been human on a cart...like some perverted skit in a Monty Python flick. This being will never failed to plead with its eyes and moans, making me certain I was going to have to sacrifice it in an excruciating way in order to progress.
Puzzles form the fulcrum of progression in Scorn. The massive structure that I explored in this twisted campaign houses mechanisms, cages, elevators, and slimy terminals. Everything in this world seems to take a page out of the body horror playbook, appearing as a mixture of biological material and metal that I had to find ways to interact with. From this point of view, Ebb Software's approach is pretty ruthless—much like the world in which Scorn is set, there are no indicators, information, or god forbid, tips to guide players. I had to figure out for myself what to do and how to do it, which switches could be activated and which could not.
Then there is the combat...in my estimation, the least successful part of the experience. Over time I discovered more powerful weapons, from this weird world’s versions of a pistol to a grenade launcher. I was only able to collect ammunition at certain depots and only in very limited amounts, while the pathetic creatures (three or four enemy types, plus a single boss) that scurried around this nightmarish labyrinth were able to inflict massive damage on me rather easily and killed me quite often.
Those deaths ended up more frustrating than they needed to be at times. In a central part of the campaign, I was forced to repeat a fairly long section several times due to a poorly placed checkpoint that left me with a scant amount of life and few bullets—a nightmare scenario that Scorn did not seem interested in rescuing me from. This led me to employ trial-and-error tactics in an attempt to overcome sequences like this without the ability to withstand even a single blow...which, of course, was most frustrating indeed.
Even the game’s desperately needed health recharges were offered sparingly but still in a disgusting manner, as I had to squish a starfish-like creature to recover some energy. Scorn would have been better off with an automatic health recovery system (à la Halo). In fact, perhaps it would have been better not to include combat at all; gunplay isn’t really the point in a game of this ilk, and on top of that, it’s stiff and unresponsive at its best moments here.
If the intention of the Scorn developers was to give life to a gruesome visual experience like the video game world has never seen, I can certainly say that they succeeded here. Virtually every single graphic element of the game conveys nastiness and foreboding: the bars that look like vertebrae because they are actually vertebrae, the miserable creatures I met along the way, the monstrous parasite that literally had me clinging to my guts, and so on.
The enemies are a bit of a disappointment as they aren’t too varied, but the level design they’re roaming around within is top-notch stuff. Claustrophobic architecture is offset by the desperate desolation of empty and open spaces; in particular the “cathedral” seen in the final stages of the campaign, with its perverse bas-reliefs, seems to tell the story of how this world went to hell.
That dark tale is also conveyed via Scorn’s bleak soundscape. The musical score and accompaniment barely exists, but the game does an excellent job in terms of sound design and effects, with screams, moans, and awful, squishy noises that lend to the overall mystery behind this nightmare experience.
Scorn offers a distressing and revolting visual experience that owes a great deal to the works of several horror masters. It’s a true journey into horror, as I wrote at the beginning, which leads to an exploration of a ghastly, brutish world in which flesh, blood, and metal come together in an excruciating way. The title is ruthless even in its mechanics, as it requires a bit of commitment to get into and is downright frustrating in some situations. The puzzles dress Scorn up just enough to make it something more than just another walking simulator, but the futile combat mechanics almost seem like an afterthought which drags down the experience...almost to the depths of video game damnation.
SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5
PLAY IF YOU LIKE:
• Succubus. While Scorn doesn’t entertain any of the lasciviousness that Madmind Studios’s game does, it does have a rather similar off-putting and sinister vibe throughout.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Scorn may not be based on an unforgettable, mind-bending story by the great Harlan Ellison, but it does venture down the similar paths that Cyberdreams’s point-and-click classic does.
💬 Have you played Scorn? Let us know what you think of it in the comments! Even if you haven't played it, leave a comment sharing your thoughts on your favorite visceral horror games!
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