Scorn Looks Like Giger, But Might Play Like The Witness

ign.com:

Scorn feels as though it teeters on the gunk-covered ledge between “intriguingly disturbing” and “willfully grotesque.” In the hour or so I play of the the game – its completely tutorial-less opening section – I’m introduced to a truly unpleasant biotechnological setting, shown how its many opaque puzzles will link together to form neat chains of wordless storytelling, and gently repulsed by it occasionally pushing beyond its Giger-indebted fleshscape and into less impressive straight body horror.

The core of Scorn is in its puzzles. It may play from the perspective of an FPS, and occasionally offers you what look like weapons, but this is a cerebral game at its core. Opening with your mysterious main character literally ripping themselves out of its seemingly living landscape, Scorn gives no on screen indication of what to do, or how anything works, leaving you to trudge the gently undulating corridors of its world, occasionally sticking your hands into horrible contraptions just to see what happens.

To Scorn’s credit, this self-directed approach works well. Quickly, you’re given (well, violently implanted with) equipment that allows you to manipulate biotech machinery, leaving you to try and work out what the hell any of it is for. The player’s then drawn to a single puzzle - unlock this big door - that you slowly realize is, in fact, made up of multiple smaller puzzles that must be chained together.

These range from the oddly familiar (one puzzle about retrieving a huge, disgusting egg from a wall is actually a simple sliding puzzle in disguise) to the truly bizarre (one section had me using what seemed like an abattoir bolt gun to destroy floating, steam-spewing machines in an effort to… feed a huge column?). It’s a