(5/10)

I technically wasn’t able to finish this because my save crashes on Act 3, and since the game’s autosave system is so infrequent I had to lose over an hour of progress I didn’t care to redo. But seeing as how I didn’t have much left at that point anyway, whatever

The most positive thing about it is from the jump it’s clear they nailed the art and atmosphere of this world. Inspired by HR Giger’s work, this captures the same disgusting and otherworldly alien aesthetics wonderfully, and for the first hour I was pretty into it. Exploring these barren ruins with no company but the endless flesh and corpses, setting off with no idea who you are or where you’re trying to go with little but vague tools to guide your way. I liked the focus on loneliness over blatant scares

But its actual gameplay left much to be desired. Puzzles weren’t particularly complicated and most of the game’s basically spent doing bland mini-games or moving objects in the correct order, then it quickly turns out you aren’t actually alone and that leads to Scorn’s biggest fault. Why this needed to include combat is beyond me, but it really drags it down. Your weapons are terribly clunky and you have to get really close for them to even register, enemies throw projectiles you can hardly dodge, ammo and health is too limited for this system to work well, etc

And of course I hated the lack of enough checkpoints, seeing as how it’s easy for the game to randomly corrupt save files or soft lock progress. Visuals aside, it’s disappointing

Reviewed on Oct 17, 2022


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