When you first begin to play Scorn you’ll find yourself fused to the floor by what appear to be bones and muscle tendons. Freeing one arm from the fleshy fusion you’re stuck inside, you’ll see an alien church from the precipice of a dusty cliff. You’ll flash between the two, but one thing is clear: that is your target.
Scorn doesn’t give you a cutscene or any kind of introduction to explain what is actually happening in this moment, but it doesn’t need one. What you are, where you are, and what you’re doing is immaterial. You’re just you, exploring a labyrinth of ribcage walkways and phallic creations.
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You can guess at your situation from your surroundings. Whatever you are, there are more of you everywhere, corpses of creatures pouring out of machines in piles. It feels like Myst in the best ways: you wander without any guidance and just investigate, interacting with whatever you can to see what it does.
It feels truly alien, even from a game design perspective. There are no telling flickering lights to lead you down the ideal hallway, it’s a truly unknowable space. On the one hand, this level of hands-off exploration can be incredibly engaging, and each revelation can feel like a huge achievement. On the other hand, you need to aimlessly navigate interconnected and identical corridors in order to get to that huge achievement.
One puzzle sees you complete a block puzzle, grabbing an egg with a claw, and then revealing a half-formed humanoid still fused with the shell. Eggs hatch. That’s the way things are in the natural world. Scorn’s world is violently unnatural, therefore, you take the alien creature out of its egg with something like an ice cream scoop. It’s gory and more than a bit gross. Most of the creature is thrown into a garbage chute, while a severed arm is left behind and can be used to open up a door to progress even further. Lovely.
Once this is over, you’re introduced to your first weapon, which looks incredible and feels incredibly bad. It’s a grapple gun that attaches to your arm and has a minuscule amount of range. When engaging overgrown fireflies, you must walk up and slap them in the face with your grapple gun. Gauging your weapon’s effective distance is difficult at the best of times, though.
Combat is a footnote when compared to the amount of investigating and exploring you’ll be undertaking in Scorn, so some dodgy weapons aren’t a huge complaint. But what might put you off is the aesthetics of it all.
Scorn is disgusting and mysterious in equal measure. It’s visually grotesque but gets under your skin. The atmosphere is thick and the art direction is distinctive, if nothing else. Scorn looks set to be worth your time when it releases on October 21. If the rest of the game is combat-light, then it’ll be a great experience based on this preview.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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