Scorn is a bleak first-person adventure through tunnels of sinewy machinery and a vast wasteland, with nothing to guide you but a silent companion and parasitic enemies. The puzzles are (purposely) about as fun as a lobotomy, especially given the lack of on-screen text to guide your hand.
However, after eight years of anticipation finally culminating in this steampunk flesh prison, we aren't to be deterred so easily. Those who powered through it all and finally emerged victorious will know the confusing struggles of booting up the game for the first time, so here are ten things everyone had done whilst playing Scorn.
10/10 Interact With Everything (And Nothing)
After waking up from a dizzying slumber, you stumble to your feet and struggle to get your bearings. A locked door looms ahead in the gritty darkness, and as you fumble to unlock it you realise that you can't make it work — at least, not yet.
That won't stop you from trying everything to get it to budge, including mashing every button and trying to find some sort of melee weapon with which to prise it open. Operating the daunting contraptions in the tunnels is confusing and not always possible, but things become a bit more interactive once you turn the corner and venture a little deeper before tackling that first puzzle.
9/10 Get Disgustingly Fascinated By The World
If there's one thing that Scorn aces, it's building a singularly oppressive atmosphere. The walls glisten with a gelatinous ooze, strips of flesh interwoven with bright flashes of metal to give the semblance of being inside a living, breathing machine.
A closer look at the architecture reveals pits of shattered bone and skulls — nothing you can physically pick up yourself, but still something horrifying to behold as you traipse aimlessly through the tunnels and wonder if you've gone in circles already.
8/10 Struggle With The Puzzles
You don't need to be a genius to complete the puzzles in Scorn, but these do not mess around when it comes to logic, lucky, and going it alone. Since the game lacks audio or written cues and explanations, you'll have to jump right in and try to make do by yourself. This feeds into the discombobulation experienced by the character, having just woken up to a unique nightmare that he has no choice but to tackle.
Parsing the puzzles can make for a slow, grating start — especially for those of us used to narrative-driven games that intersperse puzzles with more combat-heavy sequences — but once you get past that first one, the rest should fall into place.
7/10 Try To Run…Faster?
Strafing and movement in Scorn is somewhat sluggish compared to a regular FPS offering. You'll notice this early on when you try to run faster, tapping every button or holding the shift-key hard enough to break your keyboard, only to surrender to the cold realisation that nope: this is it. This is how you move now.
Scorn's controls are tricky enough to make sense of without the added hurdle of getting aggravated by your slow movement speed, but it's something that gets easier to handle the further you get into the game.
6/10 Wait For Some Voice Lines
Scorn is light on the storytelling — or rather, it relies on the visuals to tell a story of ambient despair. What does our creature sound like? Can he even speak? And above all, what actually happened here? These questions are to remain unanswered.
The winding journey of these silent protagonists is one that is open to player dispute, involving visual allegories pertaining to birth, death, and the tumultuous pain that is life itself. It's best to approach Scorn as more of a gaming experience than a story-driven game since fans of the latter might find the ambiguity a tad disappointing.
5/10 Not Have Researched The Game At All
There are two types of people playing Scorn right now: those who have been on the edge of their seats waiting for its release, and those who knew nothing about it other than it is a horror puzzle game out on Game Pass.
The good news is that no matter which side of the tracks you are on, all of us felt the same sense of dread and confusion while trying to work out the game, its story, and our stakes in it as a player. Loading in, you might be expecting something akin to Resident Evil meets Silent Hill, but you're best going in with zero expectations and not researching it at all for the most sincere experience.
4/10 Get Surprised By The Combat
Wait, wait. You're telling me that a game with no voice acting, no on-screen text, and no tangible storyline has combat elements? Yes, and what's more, these combat elements are almost totally insignificant to the said scant storyline. In fact, you can simply run past a lot of the ghoulish beings you run into during your grisly adventure — that is, if you can ignore their phlegmy gurgling and avoid their powerful hit damage in the process.
Combat doesn't play a large role in the game until a little later, so it can feel like extra work at times when you've already succumbed to the slow, droning lull of early-game events. That being said, the change of pace is welcome, if only to instill some sense of self-preservation in an otherwise-desolate world to which you had long since relegated yourself.
3/10 Got Lost In The Tunnels
If you spent a large chunk of your time wondering where the hell you actually are, and if you've already seen that precise flesh-machine already, you are certainly not alone. Scorn is a feat of pure psychological endurance, forcing you to question each twist and turn and second-guess your own sense of direction.
The good news is that most of these tunnels lead back to one another, so it's hard to get properly lost. However, you definitely have got turned around at least four times and doubled back on yourself to make sure you haven't missed anything. After all, with no on-screen HUD to aid you, who knows what else is lurking, waiting for you in the dark?
2/10 Try To See Your Own Body
Listen, we know what you did as soon as you were in a bright enough spot to check. Being a first-person game and only seeing flashes of your character model in the opening cutscenes, we all made sure to have a good look at our own fabulously flayed form.
Tilting the camera down with gleeful interest, you got a birds-eye view of your own twisted veins, pale lungs, and something red in the middle of your sternum that probably should resemble a heart. Only your hands and feet seem to be protected by actual skin, which is just as well since you are completely stark naked and have a lot of walking, shooting, and fiddling with machinery to do before the closing credits.
1/10 Have Your Ears Ringing – And Liked It
The sound design in Scorn is a unique beast, one relying on the creak of metal and hollow sounds of cavernous expanses. Intersperse this with sickening crunches of bone and cartilage as you navigate various puzzles and stick your hands and fingers into places they ought not to be stuck, and you have one hell of a soundscape to guide you on your journey.
This constant atmospheric presence is the perfect complement to Scorn's visuals, the two combining to form the definitive personality of the game while only hinting at your place in it. Your ears were ringing with these ominous sounds long after taking off your headphones, and you know what? You kinda liked it. In a game built on sensory overload, this is one key component of Scorn that all players will appreciate.
Source: Read Full Article