$59.99 | PC, XBS/X | ebbsoftware.com
In my favourite moment, late in Scorn, you transition from the industrial underbelly of this forgotten civilisation to its alien and terrifying, yet also still somehow mournful, regal capital. The entire game up until now you’ve seen the gruesome brown machinery of this ancient people churning and grinding to do something, ripping familiarly human-like beings apart, sometimes while they’re still alive, for some unknowable purpose.
Here in the Polis, you see a decaying cathedral adorned with colossal statues of these same beings, some taking heroic poses, others cradling red, glowing wombs, and many of them copulating. How did this civilisation digest the contradiction in how it represented itself versus how it treated its people?
The core gameplay loop reminds me most of Portal, or even a more gruesome take on Myst. You enter a new area and have to slowly pick your way through, soaking up the creepy ambience and sussing out the function of the various grotesquely biological apparatuses left behind by this lost civilisation. Scorn’s protagonist looks to be a member of that civilisation, maybe the last one left after everyone else went to the body horror Rapture.
’s combat is reminiscent of a classic. You move very slowly, enemies hit hard, and more than two facing you at once is’s combat, if enjoy is the right word. It’s tense like old-school survival horror, and it always feels like I’m just barely making it by the skin of my teeth as I hustle to avoid attacks, weaving close to these weird flesh monsters to bop them with my penis gun.
