Scorn - Beautiful Body Horror
When the credits rolled on my playthrough of Scorn, I was left numb and questioning why my character embarked on their journey through the Geiger-esqe world. What was the point of the torturous combat or the ambiguous puzzles if it all culminated in me becoming a humanoid bush with my parasite who tormented me until the end? Through the blood and tortured body parts, did we accomplish anything?
After a couple of days, I've come around to see Scorn as a great experience that could have been stronger if it leaned into what makes it special. The art is obviously incredible, and there are moments in the story when you just stare at what surrounds you. When blowing holes through beast at the bottom of the world, the way the beast swings its head to stare down menacingly at you fills your core with dread. These moments aren't easy to achieve, but Scorn will regularly have you marveling at the world built of tortured corpses.
I also loved how inextricably connected you feel to the incredible world you navigate. You character cannot jump, always planting his feet on the ground either in a slow plod or a begrudging stumble. The parasite is my favorite addition to the experience, especially how the parasite has tangible impacts on game play. There are moments in the story where the character falls to its knees and watches the parasite's hands punch out of its torso with blood and viscera splattering out. The parasite does damage to you during each of these episodes making you keep track of them and heal accordingly. The best part is at the end of the game, when the parasite overtakes your hand preventing you from interacting with objects. Your only way around this is to crush your arm in a machine to make the parasite temporarily retreat. You then have a few valuable seconds to run to the machine you need to use before the parasite overtakes your hand again. Scorn at its core is about the sacrifice required to move forward, and the parasite makes this impossible to avoid. At the beginning of the game you sacrifice a humanoid for it's arm, but now you are what is on offer for progress.
These peaks are lessened by the frustrating elements that hamper the experience as a whole. The combat is.....a choice. Considering the quality of the puzzles in the game, the choice to have combat at all feels off. There are points where you are forced to contend with multiple enemies at once, leading you to inevitably fall limp and wait for the loading screen to bring you back. The penis pump gun is cumbersome and slow to reload, leading to more deaths as you wait for the pump to reload. I ultimately wish there wasn't any combat at all in the game. I would have rather been forced to cower in fear and hide from enemies, pushing me further into the maze of the the map. Of course it's easy to back seat game design, but it's clear that the right balance was not struck in this case.
I also wish the game mechanic added at the very end of the game was used to a fuller extent. Right before the the credits role, the protagonist splits it's consciousness between two bodies which carry them and solve a puzzle to get them through a gate. Considering the amount of effort that goes into resurrecting these bodies and how interesting the game feels as you switch between the them, I was surprised to see the game end after using the two bodies to open a single gate. The new mechanic definitely had more interesting potential use cases. Distracting a charger to access a room he is guarding or solving a more complex puzzle that had to be done simultaneously would have given a greater payoff for the new game mechanic before the game concluded.
The developers of Scorn should be incredibly proud of the this piece of art they have put into the world. As a proud lover of body horror, Scorn is a delightful buffet for the eyes. I was always drawn forward to see what new contorted mixture of the natural and the artificial awaited me. Scorn provides inspiration for me to make art that is ambitious and swings for the fences. Even if not everything is perfect, Ebb Software should be commended for for pushing the envelope and making something truly unique and special in the video game space.