Scars Above took me by surprise. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it certainly didn’t involve using brains instead of brawn to navigate my way through a game that feels like it should be utterly inaccessible to me, yet isn’t at all.
I was drawn to Scars Above as I love sci-fi, and I can’t resist a female protagonist. I had Tomb Raider meets Alien in my head and as a fan of both, I was excited to play it. Then someone mentioned “challenging” and the most dreaded of all words “souls-like.” There may have been other words, too, but I was overcome with panic about what lay ahead.
As someone who has dyspraxia and the reflexes of a sloth, I’ve not even attempted any Souls titles. I know I’d just spend hours being frustrated and getting nowhere. While it was stressed that the game is inspired by Souls games but crucially isn’t one, I was still anxious until I played it.
You take on the role of Dr. Kate Ward, a scientist who finds herself stranded on a hostile alien planet after the ship she’s onboard is hurled across space and crashes on an extrasolar planet. She’s a scientist, not a soldier, and needs to think fast to work out what happened to the ship, and the crew. Things that make no sense begin to appear very quickly, and the environment poses a lot of questions you have no answers to.
As you begin to unravel this mystery, the first thing you’ll notice is that there are no traditional weapons in Scars Above. Not even a pistol. Instead, Kate arms herself with a device she originally made to redirect electrical current. Over time, you’ll scavenge items that help you harness other elements with the device, including fire and ice. It’s a modular makeshift weapon, which you need to keep changing up to fit your needs. The idea of thinking on your feet and working around problems using your science knowledge, since you lack all but basic combat training, will become more important as you progress.
When watching gameplay it feels like Scars Above is taking heavy cues from Souls games, as well as punishing titles like Returnal. However, there is a notable difference in the way the combat is executed. Firstly, Scars Above has three difficulty levels. Secondly, full-on combat is not always the only option. You will face encounters where you’ll be stuck in a death loop, yet, so far at least, it feels like one you can learn from. The mechanics are more complex than simply shooting an enemy in the face, and often thinking is required. You can scan and research enemies to discover weaknesses to exploit, using not just your makeshift weapon but also potions, elemental reactions, and the environment to your advantage. Clues such as colour differences in the surrounding area or on an enemy’s skin can also help indicate flaws that you can exploit.
By moving the focus from swift reactions and toward lateral thinking and puzzle solving, the game immediately becomes not only more accessible for me, and others like me, but also more engaging. If you just want to punch some monsters in the face then the option is available, but it’s not always the most efficient or easiest way of progressing. The game appears to be brute forcible so far, but is more fun when you work to find alternatives to simply smashing everything in your path.
In the demo I played at a recent preview event, I predictably didn’t get far. However, I enjoyed the experience in a way I never expected. If you want a perfectly polished game then you’re in the wrong place. This isn’t a triple-A extravaganza, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. It’s not made by a huge studio and it doesn’t come with a hefty price tag. But, while you won’t get pixel-perfect avatars and flawless environments, what you will get is an intriguing narrative that makes you want to explore. You’ll do this on a planet that evokes different elements of many sci-fi classics and melds them together into something new. Along the way you’ll also start to think in new ways as you work out how to make a scientist do the job of a soldier, using your cobbled-together element manipulator to overcome some incredibly terrifying swamp demons.
Scars Above takes inspiration from so many sources that even the developers have lost track, but it makes sure to extract the very best of each one. You can see that time has been poured into the execution of combat, the mechanics of the makeshift weaponry, and the environmental clues that help you navigate this planet and its hostile inhabitants. While it remains to be seen if the story holds my attention long-term, or if the frustrations deepen too much as the game progresses, so far the outcome looks promising.
I never expected to be able to play, let alone enjoy, a game with mechanics that involve a lot of respawns and are deliberately challenging, yet I find myself looking forward to playing again. I’ve got puzzles to solve, a mystery to unravel, and some more stuff to burn with my new flamethrower enhancement. For a makeshift weapon, this thing is fierce.
Scars Above is due to be released on February 28, 2023 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, and PC. We tested the PC version at a preview event.
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