Scorn

Back in 2019, on my Agony post I noted how some people had mixed it up with Scorn and had been disappointed. Well, here we are in 2022 and Serbian Ebb Software's Scorn too is finally out -- and it's not exactly much better than Agony. Visually Scorn is without fault -- it is one massive, masterfully created moving digital painting -- but its gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.

A surreal first person experience

Scorn was inspired by the artists Hans Ruedi Giger (1940 – 2014) and Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005). Both were specialized in the field of surrealism, Giger describing his own style as "biomechanical". Scorn appeared to have less Giger-style sexually suggestive shapes than I had expected though. However, that impression went away when I got to the final chapter where the game goes full balls to the wall with it.

One could question the worth of art that imitates so hard someone else's style. What are you but a copycat? I would say that in this case there is added value at least in the medium it is in. Creating textures, lighting, models, and animation for a game and have it be so cohesive and high quality is not a small feat. Scorn is a huge tribute to Giger and Beksiński, no doubt, but it is also a work of art in its own right.

The game has no speech or written text and its left-to-interpretation narrative fits its surrealistic visuals. Apparently the game's artbook does shed some light into what's going on though I feel you're better off without that information, to draw your own conclusions. I have read few interesting theories by other people as well.

Despite there being no clearly told story, the ending left me disappointed. It very much got an impression that my dude did not manage to accomplish whatever he came there to do.

Filled with tedium

Initially Scorn is a walking simulator with few puzzles. It probably would have been better if that had been the gameplay for the whole 5ish-hour game. Either that or improve something in the game's combat.

You soon get a weird poking tool that also gets weird gun attachments. Combat with it never becomes fun because everything is so clunky: you move slowly, you reload slowly, ammunition is scarce, enemies have too much health, you have too little health, and healing is scarce. It's all just a fucking tedious struggle all the way to the end. Reminded me way too much of Agony in that regard.

Enemies don't chase you too far but with the narrow corridors and the creatures usually being near something you need to interact with, avoiding combat isn't really a thing most of the time. The final chapter has a boss fight, which might have been even fun if not for all the aforementioned jank.

I found it surprising that the game has an actual heads-up display when your weapon is readied. A game like Scorn that is all about its visuals would benefit from having ammo and health displayed in some diegetic way instead of having an overlay pop up.

Surprisingly enough as well, Scorn has a field-of-view slider. Usually first person horror experiences are so worried about clipping that it's excluded, and even this one does warn you about it. As a typical Unreal Engine 4 game, Scorn has a lot of its post-processing effects rolled into one setting. But, because it is an Unreal Engine 4 game, you can also edit those effects individually via a .ini file. For instance, while film grain kind of adds to the Beksiński visuals, I'd still rather have it gone.

I had few other technical issues with the game but there has been a patch since that addressed all of those problems and they're probably not worth mentioning anymore. Also, I hadn't expected to have menus in Finnish when I first launched the game. I'm guessing with Scorn having so little text, localization into many languages didn't require particular effort. The last time I've seen a video game default to Finnish was in Portal 2, I think.