“Scorn impresses as a visual tribute to HR Giger, but the half-formed gameplay hurts its horror more than it helps.”
Avg
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Striking art
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Stunning sound design
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Some solid puzzles
Against
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Rare shooting
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Aggravating scarcity of resources
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Readability issues
Scorn he has three things on his mind: birth, death and HR Giger.
Heavily inspired by the Swiss artist known for creating the iconic Alien Xenomorph, Scorn isn’t just interested in imitating Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic for the sake of flattery. Instead, the developers at Ebb Software are eager to engage with the thematic themes present in his work. It’s an unconventional horror game that explores the trauma of birth through a range of grotesque and nightmarish imagery, from claustrophobic skin ducts to bloated fetal monsters. Although taking the deeply personal works of a unique artist and turning them into a genre-bending video game feels a bit like squeezing a watermelon through a straw.
Scorn is in conversation with HR Giger’s art, but he’s playing a game of telephone. Despite achieving the aesthetic it aims for with excellent sound design and striking visuals, it struggles to deliver the same intimacy that makes Giger’s work so unsettling. Even when it happens, ScornArtistic ambitions and video game commitments are often at odds with each other. Ebb Software makes bold design decisions here to achieve the perfect atmosphere, but those decisions make for a frustrating first-person shooter and puzzle game that never feels fully formed.
Birth trauma
Instead of providing a clear story, Scorn he wants you to feel it in your bones. “The Story” follows a skinless humanoid wandering some form of creepy alien world that looks like an HR Giger painting come to life. The horror game mostly takes place in dark corridors that look like the inside of a body. Veins and flesh flow through its narrow passages, as if it were all part of the nervous system of some giant being.
All of this is brought to life with impressive visual design, while grotesquely detailed environments pump blood into their raw body horror.
While Scorn it has an abstract narrative, its thematic lines are unmistakable. More specifically, birth is a visual motif that runs throughout the game from its opening moments. Through my gameplay, I would encounter ancient statues with glowing red wombs, have an alien parasite forcefully burrow into my stomach, and see tons of phallus imagery. All of this is brought to life with impressive visual design, while grotesquely detailed environments pump blood into their raw body horror. Although most notable of all is its stunning sound design, full of wet splash and ambient buzz that add up to a great pair of headphones.
While immediately impressive as a technical feat, Scorn can be thematically inscrutable early on. During business hours, I spent a lot of time examining whether there was much meat in its unsettling atmosphere. It will be easy to write it off as a hollow, crude horror, but that would be an understatement of what Ebb Software is aiming for with its ambitious tonal work. Although you want to connect his various images, you might want to brush up on your HR Giger knowledge first.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
For some art critics, Giger’s work is fascinating because it is a raw projection of his subconscious mind. Namely, the artist had a difficult birth, the doctors had to pull him out of his mother’s womb with tweezers. Some theorize that Giger always carried that trauma with him, letting it bleed into his art. When viewed through that lens, many of his gruesome images begin to make sense. His work is filled with fetuses, narrow passages that stretch like birth canals, and sterile mechanical instruments that intersect with the human body.
Scorn he certainly seems to understand the appeal of Giger’s work and seeks to engage with the ideas beneath the aesthetic. It is a series of births and rebirths, with a nameless protagonist plucked from a safe cocoon. Its horror comes from making players feel like a confused baby trying to survive the unknown nightmare they’ve just been forcibly and suddenly thrust into. While I can appreciate the way it goes against conventional storytelling to achieve this, a crucial layer is missing. Giger’s work feels deeply intimate, allowing us to look directly into his mind and dissect it like a psychiatrist. Scorn he does not carry that same force, which can make his philosophical thinking about life and death detached from any emotion.
Getting the vibe going is one thing; replicating the deepest reaches of another’s psyche is a much more difficult task that I’m not sure about Scorn withdraws.
Gloom and doom
If it seems like I’ve barely spent any time talking about Scornactual gameplay, that’s because it’s the least interesting part of the project. Its most evocative moments come from exploring the gruesome world like an art gallery, and its most frustrating come from actually playing. This is due to a certain friction that occurs between Ebb Software’s artistic vision and what makes a game that plays well.
Scorn is something between a survival horror game, a first person shooter and a rare 3D puzzle. The shooting aspect is also the most underdeveloped and overthought part of that equation. Throughout the game, players will interact with a small handful of enemy types. Players collect four weapons to defend them, which look like David Cronenberg’s flesh gun Existence. One functions like a piston engine that can hit enemies, while the other is more akin to a traditional shotgun. However, each weapon only works at a very short range, making them functionally similar (except for the fourth weapon, which is rarely used because it was introduced late). The shooting is so sparse in its execution that I wondered if it was added later in development to give the atmospheric puzzle game some commercial appeal.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
This isn’t a power fantasy, so shooting is meant to be the last line of defense. Shooting is a slow process and the reload button can also be renamed to the suicide button when trying to use it mid-fight, as it triggers a painfully slow animation. Ammunition is extremely rare as bullets can only be replenished from a few disposable stations. Health works the same way, as players carry a heart-like organ that has limited healing costs. In theory, these decisions should make encounters feel more intense because players are always hyper-aware of how many resources they have left at any given moment.
In reality, scarcity creates a lot of artificial frustration. When I die and reload at a checkpoint, my health and ammo remain locked to where they were when I saved. On several occasions, I would find myself loading with one patch of health left and no healing costs. I would spend minutes going back to where I was, watching the game’s slow motion cinematics, only to be killed by the same acid-spitting enemy. With no way to go back and increase my resources, I just had to repeat that sequence until I passed, replacing any good horror tension with the tedium of repeating the same part of the game far from boring.
It’s jammed with overwhelming survival aspects that dampen the horror more than support it.
Scorn it’s a bit stronger as a puzzle game, though its highlights are few and far between. I was enthralled by some of its more traditional puzzles, such as one that had me correctly fit a cylinder key into a lock by moving its teeth, but such brain-teasing moments are fleeting. Instead, the game relies heavily on interactive puzzles that simply require pulling a lever or two in the right order. Even with that imbalance, the puzzles are the only area where I can see Ebb Software’s identity shine. There’s a strong atmospheric puzzle lurking beneath the surface here, but it’s bogged down by overwhelming survival aspects that dampen the horror more than support it.
Unreadable design
Keeping the atmosphere right seems to take priority over achieving what is expected of a video game, and all design decisions lead back to the intended horror experience. This is often a mistake. For example, Scorn it has hardly any user interface. A health and ammo bar appears when aiming the gun, but the screen is otherwise clear. There are no objective markers to tell you where to go next, no map to refer to, and no instructional text to explain how anything works. It took me several hours to realize that the game even had a healing system, which I only discovered by pausing the game and seeing the “heal” button on the controller layout.
I spent a good portion of my playtime walking around lost, afraid to close the game for fear of losing my mental map between sessions.
I guess the goal here was to create a truly immersive horror experience, but the side effect is the burning issue of readability. It’s just hard to see what’s happening on the screen or figure out where the game wants you to go next. Levels, for example, are often difficult to navigate due to repetitive design. The winding hallways can seem indistinguishable from one another, which is why I found myself aimlessly walking back and forth down the same hallways until I found where I needed to go next. There’s also a lot of dead space in the world design, with empty nooks and crannies that turn small levels into boring mazes.
When Scorn provides visual information, it is often imperceptible. It’s easy to miss interactive objects due to the fact that they are only marked with tiny white circles. As I recounted in my Gamescom preview, one puzzle had me sliding around pods, placing one in just the right position for a grappling hook to grab. Demoist had to point out that the particular pod I needed to move had a faint glimmer of light. With no accessibility options to ease such moments, I spent a good portion of my playtime walking around lost, afraid to close the game for fear of losing my mental map between sessions.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
What is difficult is that I can feel the deliberate decisions behind me Scornlow points. I get the feeling that Ebb Software wants me to feel lost and stressed as I navigate its alien world. I should be wandering the halls wondering if I will ever escape the maze. As I count every bullet I have left and pray for an ammo reloading station around every corner, I imagine the experience unfolding as expected. But more often than not, those decisions left me wanting to escape from the game app itself, rather than the terrifying world housed within it.
Scorn is an unconventional and uncompromising psychological horror game that requires a lot of patience and a strong stomach. There’s no instant gratification here as its unsettling imagery creates an awfully slow burn that games rarely dare to provide. While I can respect what Ebb Software is up to here, in the end I feel like its dedication to artists like HR Giger goes too deep. Strip away its layers of aesthetic influence and you’re left with a half-formed horror game that may not be finished yet.
Scorn was viewed on a computer.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn