I know people have expected a lot from Scorn. Ever since the “gameplay trailer” the developers released 5 years ago, there was a lot of excitement for both the visual style and the fact that it included combat and seemed to aim at being a proper action horror game, not just a typical for the time horror themed adventure where you run away all the time. But I’ve had my reservations and the closer to release the game go, the more suspicious the trailers seemed to me so I wanted to wait and see what happens. A lukewarm reception is what happened, so I’ve decided to return to the game later, on a discount. But even that and low expectations didn’t make the experience with this game good.
It does look fantastic, of course. Although, I did have to increase the FOV and disable camera motion blur, because without the changes the game was causing a headache. But with the tweaks it looked cool, sounded alright and the overall basic idea here, for how abstract and vague it is, seemed at least promising. And apart from the fact that the game is also mercifully short, I’ve ran out of good things to say about it.
The game is mostly focused on walking and puzzle solving, which isn’t a problem in itself. But walking along a huge empty location, even when it looks pretty, gets pretty boring when you don’t have any real goal. And you don’t have any proper goals in this game apart from very short term ones. You don’t have a destination or a desire or anything, other than finding a thing that can be used and using it and then moving on until you find a next one. Even the very last moment of the game that seems to want to be dramatic is hanging completely on the fact that you’re doing what you’re doing because it’s literally the only interactive thing you can do. You don’t know why you’re doing it and why it matters, but there’s also no “I wonder what will happen”.
An approach that applies to puzzles as well, which are just there. It’s not like they are bad, it’s just that they feel sterile and tedious and the only reason you’re doing anything is because “otherwise the game won’t happen”. There’s no narrative goal to it or fun mystery in a Myst-like fashion. Occasionally the game does feature the combat that was teased in early trailers. And it’s absolute trash. It’s slow, tedious, unfun and I’ve avoided a lot of enemies not because it was “saving resources” or some tactical decision, but because it was faster and less boring. And if you die, which is quite easy, actually, or just exit the game, you might lose several dozen minutes of watching slow animations that you’ll have to do again, because the checkpointing in this game is also unreasonable and not respectful of player time.
So yeah, it’s not a good game. It’s not fun to play, being mildly amusing at rare moments, but mostly just tedious. It looks pretty so if you’re a tech artist working in Unreal Engine, maybe you can at least use this for reference. But otherwise, it’s simply not worth the little time it takes to finish and that time is better spent elsewhere.