Scorn Review: A Bleak, Beautiful, And Grotesque Mess Of Hopelessness

thegamer.com:

Scorn is not a nice experience. It is incessantly grotesque, incomprehensibly morbid, and unceasingly determined to beat you down into nothing. Its extraterrestrial landscape is wrought with the remnants of a once rich culture, a people desperately holding back an alien threat that has reduced them to nothing. Without a single piece of dialogue or written word across its entire campaign, this is a narrative experience intent on leaving you with more questions than answers. It’s also oddly beautiful, teaching us to embrace phobias in search of intrigue.

Existing in the same vein as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation, you have few weapons at your disposal and an incentive to run away from whatever threats await. Even describing them is a struggle, with many of the creatures that call this planet home being a mixture of intimate body parts and half-formed animals that resemble startled chickens or roaring pigs with no idea who or where they are. Scorn is confusing by design, and aims to frighten and educate in equal measure with a tale of hope, religion, sex, and suffering.

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It’s also mechanically archaic and occasionally frustrating, with self-imposed design flaws serving to highlight shortcomings in its limited scope. You play as an unnamed spectre, awakening one day to pull yourself from a fleshy mass that was once your prison. There is no objective in sight, just a curiosity to walk forward and find a way to escape this purgatory. You don’t stumble upon a living thing for hours, except for poor souls trapped into contraptions to clear the way forward. Their horrific screams are a necessity to progress as you pull trinkets from corpses