The parts I love about Scorn, the atmosphere, aesthetic and puzzles that remind me of an old FMV adventure game, like its some long lost 3DO game, were enough to keep me going to the end. The intentionally oblique puzzles required a lot of exploring the environments, hitting interactables and piecing together what did what in order to solve a bigger, overarching puzzle were really satisfying and personally, I liked its less is more attitude to narrative, world-building and even explanation on what everything did. There's a consistent in-world logic to a lot of the fucked up machinery you need to use and once you're on the wavelength, the puzzles aren't too difficult but crucially just challenging enough to make you feel smart as fuck for solving them.

Unfortunately, the abysmal combat is a total exercise in frustration - slow, inaccurate, clumsy and deeply unsatisfying and there's plenty of opportunity to take a cheap death because you got caught on some gland sticking out of the floor or some shit and get dumped back a good 10-15 minutes of progress, which in a game where all you really do is press some buttons and look around a bit, isn't ideal. I've seen a few places go "well, there's only about an hour of combat in the whole game" but when you can punt through it in about four hours, that's quarter of the game that is dog eggs.

No one felt the need to stick a shotgun in Myst to spice things up a bit and the Scorn devs could've done well to have kept that in mind.