In 2021, a wayward pilgrim named "bogleech" likened the horrors of space to the concept of an ant exploring a circuit board in the crumbling wreckage of Tumblr (opens in new tab). From the ant's perspective, this is some sort of terrifying alien city, and if the ant could grasp for a moment a sliver of the terrifying purpose and background of the human computer, how could it return to the ant?

I kept thinking about this article as I played Scorn. Especially my favorite moment in the second half of the game, when the game transitions from an industrial area of a forgotten civilization to a capital city with an alien, terrifying, yet somehow melancholy royal palace (I'll try not to be too specific because of spoilers).

In previous games, we've seen these ancient people smash up gruesome brown machines and tear down familiar human-like creatures, sometimes while they are still alive, for some ungainly purpose. Some have struck heroic poses, others have embraced their glowing red wombs, and many of them have copulated. How has this civilization digested the contradiction between how it expresses itself and how it treats its people?

This gray cathedral, bathed in a lilac light, is the work of Zdzisław Beksiński, a Polish artist who wished to "paint as if he were photographing a dream" and is cited as one of Scorn's main inspirations, along with H.R. Giger, the creator of the deformity ( Open in new tab), whose work was most reminiscent of Scorn's own. The striking visual feast of the alien capital, accompanied by the melancholy audio, practically brought me to tears. It was so strange and wonderful that it seemed to hint at the great mystery at the heart of Scorn.

An hour after that next level began, Scorn bugged out and I had to restart the chapter. There is no manual save, the game's generous periodic checkpoints are accessible only by player death, and the main menu can only be used to load the beginning of a chapter or the occasional midpoint marker. From the main menu, they can only be loaded at the beginning of a chapter or at the occasional midpoint marker. I speed-ran through the part of the chapter I had already beaten, with yada yada yada ancient man yada yada unknown objective yada yada, and then beat what little game was left and turned in the credits. The technical hiccups and frustrating run-backs at this pivotal moment really, seriously, offended me.

I think Scorn is a genuinely great piece of science fiction, but sometimes it just bugs me.

Scorn's core gameplay loop reminds me a lot of Portal and Breath of the Wild's shrine. Once in a new area, one must slowly pick one's way through the eerie atmosphere, exploring the function of grotesque, biological devices left behind by a lost civilization; Scorn's protagonist is a member of that civilization, perhaps the last one left after everyone else has gone to the Rapture of the Body Horror. He appears to be the last one left after everyone else has gone to the Rapture of the Body Horror.

You follow the threads of questions, pushing through to dead ends, picking up keys and puzzle pieces, trying to figure out how it all ties together until it finally pings. For example, in Scorn's first major set piece, you play a sort of game of stacking cranes to retrieve a surprising amount of cargo, then rearrange a small railroad so that you can wheelbarrow the cargo to its final destination. The crane-based puzzles were challenging but fun.

In some situations, my poking and puzzling with the few non-hostile creatures I encountered in Scorn's world had horrific consequences, and in these situations I felt worse than the mean dialogue choices I inadvertently made in RPGs. If you can imagine "denying Kim's Ace High at Disco Elysium (open in new tab)" you can see how sick I was. If it wasn't obvious, the rule is that Scorn can deliver such an emotional punch without any dialogue.

Scorn's combat is reminiscent of classic survival horror. Movement is slow, enemy attacks are fierce and overwhelming when two or more face off at once. Fighting enemies, most of whom are mindless fungus-like animals that infest the ruins, requires the use of live weapons.

The first weapon is a phallic melee weapon that must be cooled after every two shots; Scorn's combat is fun, and the combatants are able to use it to their advantage. There's a biohazard-like tension, hustling to avoid attacks, and always feeling like you're getting by just in time as you stitch up close to strange physical monsters and whack them with your penis gun.

Unfortunately, the punishing combat definitely exacerbated the checkpoint woes I mentioned. I also lost about an hour and a half of play time along the way before a glitch in the final level spoiled my profound cosmic horror vibe. After a really shitty puzzle to end my long Scorn play, I reached a new area and was instantly killed by Scorn's most serious Normal Enemy (think Lickers and Hunters from "Resident Evil"). I reloaded a minute before fighting that enemy, so I stopped to do something else, thinking I could load it on the spot the next time I played.

The next time I sat down to play, it didn't load right away. I had to start all over again from the beginning, puzzles and all. Proportionately, about half of Scorn's advertised five hours of play time was lost due to the checkpoint system. While differences in playing habits or simple luck might have avoided this sore spot altogether, I feel that a reasonable solution on the developer's part would be to provide a single rolling checkpoint save slot accessible from the menu.

Still, for all its checkpoint shenanigans and five hours of play time, "Scorn" is well worth the $40. Impressive, unique, and an earnest representation of what we'd like to see triple-A and triple-A-adjacent developers do more of, "Scorn" could certainly have worked as a low-fi "Haunted PS1"-style project, but its commitment to grotesquery is a high-end, modern purely benefited from high-end modern rendering. In any case, Scorn's costs can be avoided by accessing it via Xbox PC Game Pass.

Scorn's condensed focus makes an interesting counterpoint to Ghostwire Tokyo (open in new tab), another first-person horror experience with an impressive visual design released in 2022. Ghostwire combines five hours worth of fresh ideas with 10 to I spent less time in Scorn than I did in Ghostwire Tokyo.

Scorn, in a word, rocks. It makes meaningful use of high-end art and rendering resources; instead of 200 gigabytes of battle royale maps or the most realistic simulation of Ronald Reagan's jaw, Scorn presents something more deliberate and artistically upsetting. One hopes that the pain of checkpoints will be alleviated by the patch.