This really is the definition of hit-or-miss. Despite the fact that this is a 5/5 review I can absolutely understand why it got the reception it did, especially when it was advertising itself as something other than a walking sim, and on top of that the insane price requirement of AUD$60 for <10 hours of gameplay. If you've been reading about Scorn and think it's up your alley, unfortunately the only thing I can encourage you to do is play it on gamepass, because no matter how you angle it, the dollar-to-time ratio can only be validated if it's a well and truly high-bar experience for you, and as it currently stands, it's very much not for most people, even the ones who have positive feelings about it.
Scorn is unflinching. More than anything, it's a game designed to provide a specific experience, with every other mechanic in the game layered on top of that experience, working in tandem to heighten it. If that experience - of a broken world using its last legs to try and kill you at any opportunity, of self-preservation and determination and blurring the religious with the scientific, of everything about Scorn feeling immensely heavy from the atmosphere to the combat - is not what you are after, then put the controller down. At the very least, if not enjoyable, it's then highly respectable that the experience focus was the route Ebb decided to go even after the development hell Scorn went through. If I were a game dev making Scorn and realised how much time and effort was going to sink into it, I would have been highly tempted to make this game appeal to a larger audience.
But that's not what happened here. Scorn is an exercise in despair and foreignness, in trying to grapple with what little you can understand and that no one will ever hold your hand along the way. Play this game if you're looking for an experience that's atmospherically unforgiving. If not, then that's perfectly fine.
Scorn is unflinching. More than anything, it's a game designed to provide a specific experience, with every other mechanic in the game layered on top of that experience, working in tandem to heighten it. If that experience - of a broken world using its last legs to try and kill you at any opportunity, of self-preservation and determination and blurring the religious with the scientific, of everything about Scorn feeling immensely heavy from the atmosphere to the combat - is not what you are after, then put the controller down. At the very least, if not enjoyable, it's then highly respectable that the experience focus was the route Ebb decided to go even after the development hell Scorn went through. If I were a game dev making Scorn and realised how much time and effort was going to sink into it, I would have been highly tempted to make this game appeal to a larger audience.
But that's not what happened here. Scorn is an exercise in despair and foreignness, in trying to grapple with what little you can understand and that no one will ever hold your hand along the way. Play this game if you're looking for an experience that's atmospherically unforgiving. If not, then that's perfectly fine.