Scorn is curious

 One might even call it a case study...

Nope! Get out of my head low-effort IGN contributors! I want to talk about something of substance today! Ahem- what I mean to say is: I want to talk about Scorn. But first I need to say for the sake of prosperity that I haven't currently played Scorn and thus cannot judge the feeling of playing the thing, which is fine because this blog isn't explicitly about that. Besides, I've watched the entire game and it seems that's a more valid way of experiencing this game than it really should be- but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, Scorn, in the beginning, was promise incarnate. It bought to life the grossly sexual abstract exoskeleton work of H.R.Geiger and realised it in stunning detail to the point where even the teaser trailers, devoid of gameplay as they were, felt like a tour through a digital art exhibition.

Almost through merit of being visually interesting alone, the game developed an aura of mystery and eccentricity where everyone who learnt of the game couldn't help but buzz about what the game might contain and the direction it may go. Because here's the thing, no game that looked so surreal had ever been realised in high fidelity before. The most you get in these sorts of styles or even more bizarre are the art games like 'Cruelty Squad' and 'LSD: Dream Emulator'. Both visually insane adventures but lacking that subtle touch of visual thematic purpose that a truly high budget 3D modelled world based on very evocative art can bestow. (Actually, with that being said: I do think Cruelty Squad's aesthetic does have some sickly confidant purpose behind it.) When you reach the point that your gameplay-less visual walkthrough teaser trailers are bumping around the heads of onlookers for months and even scratching on lists of 'most anticipated game'; you've either got yourself a solid gold opportunity splayed before you, or a hanging noose over your head.

Of course, some of that fame did come from the fact that this style of art was already made popular and not by the game developers. Famously Geiger's work was realised as the biomechanical design of the Xenomorph for Ridley Scott's seminal monster art-house-adjacent masterpiece, Alien. As well as the cultural design of the mysterious race who created these creatures, up until then known only as 'The Space Jockeys'. Borrowing from this same style of art did not breach any form of copyright with the Alien right's holders, the art exists in of itself regardless the cultural contextualisation that movies have thrust upon it, but it did draw unspoken parallels between the quality of Ridley Scott's near-timeless work and the as-of-yet untested talents of the team behind Scorn. An expectation that no-doubt weighed heavy on the heads of a team that kept pushing back and delaying Scorn as much as they could so they could ensure the final product was exactly what they envisioned. (Or, exactly what they thought the fans wanted.)

Hype didn't die down on this title like it does for some; instead it just seemed to build and fester in a ravenous hunger when the people realised the game they had built up in their heads as a swan song art house master piece was playing 'hard-to-get' with them. All this excitement and hubbub foamed up despite the fact that literally no one knew anything about what this game was and would contain. The only snippets of gameplay we saw featured grotesque firearm implements that didn't look particularly fun or interesting to shoot, unloading on enemies who appeared to have unfinished AI. (Nowhere near as unfinished as the AI in the reveal trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2; but bad enough to be concerning.) Such was the fever that it almost didn't register with people when the game stopped being pushed back, rolled up to it's release and then, recently, actually came out. I think we were all expecting a 'The Last Guardian' situation with this one and... well, there are parallels to be made...

Scorn's main source of gameplay is through it's various puzzles laid across the game world that bar you from progress until you interpret your way through some grotesque logical equation that typically does something you don't quite understand in an increadibly visually evocative way. The atmosphere of the game, it's greatest asset, is best served during moments when you are encouraged to observe and pull apart the world and environment, so this makes sense as a focus point. But it's also not exactly what the game presented itself as. The trailers demonstrated visually arresting exploration peppered with tiny moment of danger, not prolonged sections of logic quizzes. There's no problem with going that route, but maybe it should have been disclosed in marketing for the sake of clarity else you're setting up players for what appears to be a survival style game, and letting them down with a different experience entirely.

Speaking of those danger sections; one of Scorn's biggest gripes has been the gunplay which is, much as the trailers seemed to imply, pretty bad. In this sense it's very good that Scorn wasn't a survival style game, because if crucial moments of life and death were decided by functionally questionable weapons that require pinpoint depth perception it would be a very frustrating experience. Defenders will say that you're not supposed to fight the monsters and clearly the game wants you to avoid them; but games that don't want you to fight the monsters, like Outlast, Amensia and it's ilk, usually don't give you guns to kill the monsters with. That's... kind of basic concept design 101: give someone a tool, they're going to want to use it. There's no trying to excuse the bad combat by saying it isn't the point, it's a largely unfun system, it probably should have been cut.

And the most head scratching part of this is the way that Scorn, inexplicably, designs it's saving system as though it is a hardcore survival experience instead of a puzzle game through masterfully evocative environments. All saving is done at the beginning of chapters, and none of it is manual. The game tells you when you get a free break and can take long gaps between saves, making the player more and more anxious the longer they go without a save point. Such that when the monsters do appear, dying to them thanks to the poor combat comes with the high price of maybe an hour of lost time. Which is a spirit breaker for a lot of people out there. It's as if the saving in particular was built to accommodate a game that focused on high dangers high risk gameplay, but that game just got replaced with the Scorn we have today.

So is Scorn ultimately a disappointment? I think that, much like the Last Guardian, it really depends what you go in expecting. If you want to explore increadibly rendered environments that feel like the inside of an absurd art piece mixed with the unnerving aura of a world that defies your expectations; then that is what you're going to get. If the enigma that the creators fostered painted a false image of gameplay-driven horror with a Bioshock style survival world you learn to manipulate as you become more familiar with your surroundings... yeah, that's not Scorn at all. I suspect that, like Death Stranding, time is going to be kind to this game as future players enter the experience knowing a bit about what it is and coming to appreciate the game for that; but the mystery angle that all the marketing relied on built an impossible standard to match. This whole unveiling has left me nervously hoping my mysterious indie screen pleaser of choice, Atomic Heart, lives up to everything it promises to be.