Scorn is a survival horror game that was released on Game Pass last week. It felt like that for a couple of hours. I work at H.R. Giger & Sons to hit buttons, stick my fingers into prehensile holes, and scoop the guts out of screaming human meat. All day long, I work for a blue collar.
I wanted to try Scorn because it is on Game Pass and it looks like it will make me cringe. Scorn generated a lot of buzz on social media despite receiving little fanfare or marketing ahead of time.
I wasn't sure what to expect from the game. All I knew was to expect things to be dark and wet because of the advice on social media. Surprisingly, despite being based on the works of horror artist H.R. Giger and your character walking around a spaceship that gets its decor inspiration from the inside of the human colon, my misophonia triggered didn't really go away. The sound is designed in a way that it won't be as bad as I expected. The most wholesome game on the planet right now is completely unsuitable for me because of all the noises.
Scorn does not feel very frightening. When you hold a weapon or interact with a device, the game throws you into the flesh pit with a bare-bone interface. There isn't a voice-over or hint. There's nothing. It adds a great atmosphere, but it also makes you feel like you are in a meat puppet. The game becomes: "Go here, do this thing, do the next thing, and hope you don't get lost." The scariness factor isn't helped by the fact that you start with no weapons and nothing to attack you. I think it would be more frightening and interesting if the game were filled with hidey-holes to avoid slow-plodding menaces. There isn't anything. When you are attacked in the second area of the game, there is nothing you can do to stop it. The way the holes on quiver devices when you stick your fingers in them and the way the alien cattle prod weapon thrusts when you fire it is really upsetting to me.
I don't know anything about the game. I could have adjusted my expectations of fear if I had known about Scorn. At least give me a scare if the game is inspired by H.R. Giger.
The puzzles are easy if you know what you're talking about. This game doesn't give you anything. If you get to a puzzle, you need to understand what the puzzle is asking. There needs to be a happy medium between Scorn's style of "figure it the fuck out you misbegotten sack of electrified" and the kind of "blurts out the puzzle's solution 10 seconds after actually glimpsing the puzzle" style of the "
It doesn't have its hooks in me yet, which is a big problem for a Game Pass game. Money is not wasted if a game feels boring or uninteresting. The puzzles keep me playing Scorn for a long time. The frightening will kick in soon.
Scorn is available on multiple platforms.
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