NOTE: Our review was delayed because our original reviewer was unable to progress through it due to game-breaking bugs. I inherited the review, and too had a delay at one point due to a broken puzzle. It seems these technical issues aren't unique to us, and were reported by other reviewers on the game's review Discord channel. Since the Day One patch, most of the technical issues seem to have been resolved.

Scorn is a strange game, drudging up in me feel both awe and revulsion, satisfaction and frustration. It's going to be a divisive game among those who play it, and it's proven to be divisive even within myself (or maybe that's just the inverted-person-scorpion-parasite thing turning my insides into scramble).

It's certainly more substantial and more meaty (narratively and literally) than I ever imagined it would be. What could easily have been a superficially edgy game that leans on upsetting imagery without any substance is actually a wordless and weirdly Messianic journey through one of the most daunting, evocative game worlds I've experienced. Every time you emerge from a spinal corridor or what appears to be a human-sized fallopian tube in Scorn, you open out onto a sight that could easily be concept art, worthy of printing out, blowing up, and framing on your wall - assuming you’re into that whole ‘everything is a body-horror analogy for the human reproductive system’ thing.

Even if the game's aesthetic is a facsimile of H.R. Giger, as well as that other artist so beloved by horror game designers, Zdzislaw Beksinski, it’s a damn good one, and as someone who’s partial to slow-burning mood-piece movies that are more about atmosphere than conventional storytelling, I definitely have some time to wander around taking in Scorn’s dour yet powerful world.

But some time is the key point there. Because between all the moments where I’m amazed by a brutal bridge looming over me from the volumetric green gloom, or a three-storey-house-sized heart that was once fuelled by the bodies of my fellow humanoid creatures, or even just a rotating door groaning into gear after aeons-long disuse (grinding up the weird fleshy masses that had grown around it over the years), I spent a lot of time lost - circling the same samey corridors until the atmosphere wears off on me, trying to find that one button I didn’t press or that one dick-shaped lever I didn’t pull.

That then brings us to the question of what Scorn is, which is an atmospheric first-person puzzle game with a bit of combat thrown in. You’re a skin-stripped humanoid creature, awakening in a hellish factory where it seems that you and your kind were being harvested by some faceless, uncaring and clearly highly advanced machine-species. But when you wake up, the entire place is abandoned, morbidly still and strewn with the evidence of the terrible human harvesting that must’ve gone on in there for centuries.

If you've read or played Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (a worthy short read, an awkward point-and-click game), this has a similar feeling of hopelessness in a world that's been taken over by a higher machine-based power with no regard for the welfare of your kind.

In some ways, Scorn's world looks like what the antagonist of I Have No Mouth, AM, would dream of: an endless cycle of suffering for the species. Stick your hand into one of the sinewy, tendony switches, and it may open a door, or it may forcibly grab you and stab some kind of rods under your flesh that let you open later doors. At one point early on, you're not quite sure whether you're helping or torturing a fellow humanoid you find. By the latter stages of the game, as you look down on your body (visible from the first-person view), you begin to accept that perhaps preserving this flayed fleshy body of yours isn't the top priority here.

I admire Scorn's decision to be more of a puzzler than a shooter. It’s actually refreshing for a game with these stylings to not just fall back on the lowest common denominator of letting you tear everything apart. When you get weapons, wielding them is deliberately awkward, and for the most part you’re discouraged from fighting enemies unless you really have to. Despite this not being a combat-centric game, I certainly appreciate that there are still smooth kill animations when you shove your short-range hole-puncher right into the faceless gob of a tumescent slug-cow.

But hole-punching a slug-cow sums up the problem with Scorn's combat, which is that it looks way better than it feels. I like how enemies seem to systemically patrol the levels, looking for viscera to feed upon before disappearing into little squelchy holes. What's less fun are the times when picking up a new weapon part or even just topping up at a health station (which is like no health station you've seen, believe me) triggers scripted enemy ambushes, which barely give you a chance to react. With movement in the game more akin to a walking sim than a shooter, forced combat (and boss fights, of which there are a couple later on) just doesn't feel necessary. Thankfully, it's not too frequent.

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Scorn has no map, no dialogue, and no text - bold choices that I'm onboard with. That being the case however, the game then has extra work in making the game world guide you in some form, such as by making its internal areas clearly navigable and distinct from each other. But between the plentiful moments where the game wants you to admire the work put in by the art and visual design team, there is a lot of dreary corridor filler that almost feels like it's been put through a Giger procedural generation algorithm. It's a mixed bag.

Each Act has a distinct theme and stylings on various points of the viscera-metal spectrum (with accompanying sickly purple, green, or reddish fog), with each one keeping you guessing as to what exactly is going on in this world. But a game that’s so reliant on atmosphere and visuals needs to be well paced; it needs to keep the player’s momentum going, because spending too long in these areas makes each one eventually grow stale, which again gives me conflicted feelings, namely I can’t wait to get out of here and I hope the next area doesn’t pull this shit again.

Sometimes a new Act will pull that shit, sometimes it won't. Act I is a pretty inauspicious start in this regard - the area feels incredibly static, samey, and uneventful - and there are a couple of moments in later Acts where you keep missing that one switch or barely discernible passageway that you need to progress to the next area.

However, I did eventually get into Scorn's strange and (I feel deliberately) uncomfortable rhythm. To someone like me - a sucker for thick ambience and cosmic dread - the perserverance pays off, and the formidable spectacles of temple complexes, unfathomably colossal creatures that ogle you curiously, cliffs on alien planets covered in pulsating red veins - really are worth some suffering for. The grandiose, colossal nature of this fallen world drudges up its own kind of cosmic horror, and it's a game that really benefits from a dark room and a large 4K screen.

Scorn's ways are obscure, and often frustrating in a way that gamers who didn’t grow up in the 90s may struggle with more than myself. It's a work of breathtaking vision and uneven execution - from its combat, to its unsatisfying ending that sadly doesn't do justice to the gruelling yet oddly poignant odyssey you embark upon. But for its flaws, Scorn makes a hell of an impression, filling me with equal parts immense curiosity and dread. I don't want to return to it any time soon - maybe ever - but I will be scouring the Subreddits and the Steam boards in an attempt to decipher it for a long time yet.

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