Some require tools, things that have been fashioned from muscle and sinew and slot into fleshy machines that hang expectantly on the wall. I solved them in my own time and I am firmly of the belief that if I – the Most Average of All the Average Gamers – can, so can you. Yes, you will be frustrated but yes, you will solve it in the end. Yes, these puzzles are deliberately opaque. If you've seen or played the opening act then you've likely already encountered the first puzzle, and it sets a very intentional tone for the rest of your adventure. And I can't help but admit just a sliver of disappointment at that. Grossed out? Sure - there was plenty of that. To be clear, this isn't a criticism - I'm never happier than playing a jump scare-free horror - but combat aside (more on that in a bit) I never felt uneasy. There are no cheap spooks or jump scares, and instead, it relies on an ominous soundtrack and its (admittedly brilliant) environmental cues to ratchet up the tension. That's not to say Scorn is a horror, though it's not, at least, not in the way some think of horror these days. Watch on YouTube Here's a couple minutes of a gameplay walkthrough to give you a sense of Scorn's overwhelming vibe. There are claustrophobic corridors where the walls look like they're constructed from bone and skin, and you can't shake the feeling that the track on the ground below your bare feet looks more like a spine than a transport system. Scorn's sickly pallor is often interrupted by a shock of scarlet, haphazard piles of miscellaneous meat - meat that used to think and feel - discarded carelessly in corners. It is stunningly disgusting and disgustingly stunning in all the right ways and for all of Scorn's faults - and I have a few, I'm afraid - its meticulously detailed aesthetic is not one of them.Īnd it's dark, too figuratively and thematically. There are holes and tubes and thrusting pistons - enough to make Freud blush - all openly inspired by the nightmare dreamscapes of the grimly delightful H.R. Our protagonist - a half-dead husk of a humanoid roaming around a (mostly) deserted alien world - endlessly thrusts their weapon into mysterious holes and sinks their fingers into fleshy control panels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Scorn is ripe with phallic imagery and actions.
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