Scorn is not a nice experience. It is incessantly grotesque, incomprehensibly morbid, and unceasingly determined to beat you down into nothing. Its extraterrestrial landscape is wrought with the remnants of a once rich culture, a people desperately holding back an alien threat that has reduced them to nothing. Without a single piece of dialogue or written word across its entire campaign, this is a narrative experience intent on leaving you with more questions than answers. It’s also oddly beautiful, teaching us to embrace phobias in search of intrigue.
Existing in the same vein as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation, you have few weapons at your disposal and an incentive to run away from whatever threats await. Even describing them is a struggle, with many of the creatures that call this planet home being a mixture of intimate body parts and half-formed animals that resemble startled chickens or roaring pigs with no idea who or where they are. Scorn is confusing by design, and aims to frighten and educate in equal measure with a tale of hope, religion, sex, and suffering.
It’s also mechanically archaic and occasionally frustrating, with self-imposed design flaws serving to highlight shortcomings in its limited scope. You play as an unnamed spectre, awakening one day to pull yourself from a fleshy mass that was once your prison. There is no objective in sight, just a curiosity to walk forward and find a way to escape this purgatory. You don’t stumble upon a living thing for hours, except for poor souls trapped into contraptions to clear the way forward. Their horrific screams are a necessity to progress as you pull trinkets from corpses to open doors that have potentially been locked for centuries.
Ever since its reveal, all the hype around Scorn has surrounded its art design. Heavily inspired by H.R. Giger, the game takes place in a world where everything feels alive. Even the most industrial of complexes you stumble across are subject to bulbous walls with a life of their own, or machines that suck your appendages into vagina-esque holes only to outfit them with valuable weapons and healing items. Those with trypophobia or arachnophobia need not apply, with many of the things you stumble across made to resemble the deepest, darkest recesses of our mind. Scorn is meant to unsettle, but I never expected it to be this effective. Imagery like this can often outstay its welcome, but the brief runtime and shifting level design ensures it never does.
The final stage especially is a triumphant monument to erotic excess, with broken relics and abandoned streets forcing me to ponder what exactly this place was trying to achieve before it all fell apart. I’d stop for several minutes to stare in awe at the scenery, knowing I would be better served looking away instead of poring over every single detail. It is masterfully crafted, and provocative in ways that few games have ever been before. You’d decry something like this as edgy or pandering in most cases, but Scorn uses its blood-soaked identity to take us through a journey across the unknown where no single interpretation is correct. What exactly brought this place to ruin or your role in its eventual restoration is never defined, and there’s a sinking feeling in my stomach that the cycle I’m a part of is doomed to repeat itself again and again until there’s nothing left but ashes. I wanted to stop playing at multiple points, but my morbid curiosity kept me enthralled, even if a few occasional frustrations bubbled forth.
Scorn is an easy game to play, but its simplicity can often be its downfall. Many puzzles you encounter are a case of trial and error, as you move around random contraptions hoping to find the right combination to trigger a machine or unlock a door. You can be stuck at these puzzles for half an hour or more, and it never feels like you are triumphing over an intricately crafted turn of trickery, but merely getting lucky. Some conundrums fold into the world building in great ways, but far too often I was backtracking or fetching keys, abiding by adventure game logic that Scorn’s core conceit otherwise rises above at almost every turn.
Combat can be similarly irksome. Scorn markets itself as a first-person experience with guns without being a shooter. But I think any game that hands you weapons - no matter how fleshy - and only offers you a path forward by opening fire and killing your enemies must be categorised as a shooter. Trying to deny that borders on pretension, even if the majority of encounters I had with alien creatures in Scorn resulted in me running away like a big baby. It has a boss battle where the only solution is to fill it with bullets, that’s shooter enough for me.
Movement is slow and gunplay is lumbering, but you’re a strange being with no combat experience trying to survive in whatever this world is. We might share some history with it, or be just another fool ready to collapse and join the cavalcade of corpses that decorate the roads we walk upon. Scorn forces us to ponder these questions constantly, and that’s precisely what makes it so fascinating to behold. All questions are worth asking if it helps you get to the bottom of everything. You’ll need a strong stomach to put forth the harder theories though, because at the centre of it all sits something undeniably sinister.
Early on you become infected with a strange disease caused by an aggressive creature who clings onto you, permanently fusing its form to your own as it digs into your organs and turns you into a living weapon. Getting rid of this thing is paramount, but it also ensures your very survival, and clearly plays a role in how this place came to be so desolate. Your health drains as it digs further, an incentive to find a cure and reach the end before it’s too late. But like so much in Scorn, the final destination is left up to interpretation, and you might end up wondering if you took a wrong turn somewhere or got a bad ending by mistake. I’m not sure if I did - the world it presents you is meant to be hopeless and without assured resolution.
Scorn is a hard game to pin down, but it’s one I can’t help but recommend. It’s disgustingly alluring in its visual execution, with each new location bringing with it a waterfall of questions as you poke, prod, and cower at every discovery. This ambition of being artsy and cryptic can hold it back at points, but there’s something fiercely admirable in its artistic vision that few games in the genre are able to match. This is a tragic horror of Lovecraftian proportions, and one that really must be seen to be believed.
