Xbox’s horror exclusive Scorn can’t transcend its Giger-inspired visuals

polygon.com:

ThroughoutScorn’s long development period, Serbian developer Ebb Software has been vocal about the inspirations for its horror game debut. In crafting its alien terrors, the studio has looked to artists famous for their capacity to unsettle, whether in the desolate surrealism of Zdzisław Beksiński or the biomechanical grotesquerie of H.R. Giger.

The work of Giger in particular has been woven into narrative before, but never quite with the focus of Scorn. Before a single face is hugged, the 1979 film Alien takes care to ground us in human company. The two Dark Seed games, both ’90s point-and-click adventures, situate us in a “normal” world before throwing us headlong into all the Giger designs that wallpaper its parallel universe.

Scorn, however, doesn’t afford us the luxury of a familiar space. Even the player character is only vaguely humanoid, as a single glance down at its body in the game’s first-person point of view raises questions. Did tearing free from the rigid, bony tendrils that entombed this thing strip away an outer layer of skin to expose the musculature? Or do all the bodies of this species look like this? Does its grunt mean there’s a mouth beneath the layer of smooth flesh where we’d expect one to be?

No internal monologue clarifies. No journal or lore codex explains. Forgoing things like maps, objective markers, collectibles, and helpful NPCs, Scorn is single-minded in its intent to maroon you within a totally alien universe. The game’s initial hours are easily its most inventive and atmospheric, forgoing jump scares and overt horror in order to build dread. It leaves you to trudge among the dispassionate metalwork, finding each environment built in service of strange, violent-looking machinery