Scorn Review (PS5) | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

Scorn was announced by Ebb Software way back in 2014, so we've been waiting a while. After a successful (if critically mixed) launch on Game Pass last year, the game is ready for PS5, but is that a good thing?

The answer to that is mostly a «yes». Inspired by the visual style of legendary artists H. R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, Scorn has one of the most focused and impressive art directions we have ever seen in a game. With a grotesque, oppressive atmosphere, the game convincingly brings its horrific biomechanical world to life. The disgustingly wet sound design and darkly ambient soundtrack further enhance everything. However, this comes at a cost, as the game mechanically vacillates between adequate and poor.

While the title is primarily a puzzler, the level design isn't of sufficient quality to make solutions gratifying. Any time the title deviates from hyper-linearity, you'll be wondering if you're going in the right direction. Some of the multi-stage puzzles are great, but there's a degree of obtuseness to everything that makes the approach irksome. Figuring out what the game wants you to do is a sizeable portion of the 4-5 hour runtime.

The game has combat, too. You'll accumulate a handful of weapons, all of which sprout out of a nasty bioweapon that becomes more a part of you as you play, but the gunplay is rarely satisfying. While a great excuse to show off some truly horrible creature design, it feels like a superfluous afterthought. The game could have functioned just fine as a horror-adjacent walking simulator.

What you get out of the game is what feels like a really great artistic idea, which the team committed to fully. And after the art was done, they tried to place their gameplay ideas anywhere they