Scorn is frustrating, because it's almost quite good.
With how striking the whole of the game's atmosphere is in the audio and visuals, it's very apparent this was the bulk of the game's focus. There's a pleasant restraint with the puzzles in that they do not feel so overly clever nor very explicitly explained - Though they could be more involved, and there's a handful of instances of tedious map scraping to make sure you've explored every possible solution, (Especially if you're playing on the extremely poorly supported Ultrawide mode which crops your view) generally the pace is kept going so that Scorn can immerse you in its upsetting environments and tell it's completely non-verbal story.
...Until that pace is often brought to a screeching halt by the game's combat sections. Scorn's combat itself isn't the worst, but even for a survival horror approach, feels unbalanced thanks to clunky item swapping, poor communication on how items function, and unsanctionable checkpointing system. - I appreciate the game's commitment to feeling alien and otherworldly with its lack of dialogue, semi-internal penises, and strictly foreign UI and iconography, but I would have hoped the encounter design would at least subtley-but-not-too-subtley explain how it wants you to play. Despite the slog, there are some very excellent stretches here; Enough to give you hope, but not enough to completely turn things around.
Scorn could be greatly improved with a single patch that addresses some of the game's balance and features like Ultrawide support or an FoV slider. As far as I can tell, this is Ebb Software's debut title and though it's uneven throughout, it is nonetheless impressive. Looking back at my screenshots and video clips, it looks even better than I remembered while in-game, and performance was excellent without as much as a single technical mishap. Scenes are consistently framed with an extreme amount of consideration and detail, you could sell me a photobook of just in-game screenshots, and It's not a game I think I will be mentally offloading wholesale any time soon.
All of Scorn's seams really lie with a small handful of very important design decisions that should have gone the other way. I'm eagerly looking forward to whatever this development team has in store next, and I'm not even sure I need it to have either puzzles or combat.
With how striking the whole of the game's atmosphere is in the audio and visuals, it's very apparent this was the bulk of the game's focus. There's a pleasant restraint with the puzzles in that they do not feel so overly clever nor very explicitly explained - Though they could be more involved, and there's a handful of instances of tedious map scraping to make sure you've explored every possible solution, (Especially if you're playing on the extremely poorly supported Ultrawide mode which crops your view) generally the pace is kept going so that Scorn can immerse you in its upsetting environments and tell it's completely non-verbal story.
...Until that pace is often brought to a screeching halt by the game's combat sections. Scorn's combat itself isn't the worst, but even for a survival horror approach, feels unbalanced thanks to clunky item swapping, poor communication on how items function, and unsanctionable checkpointing system. - I appreciate the game's commitment to feeling alien and otherworldly with its lack of dialogue, semi-internal penises, and strictly foreign UI and iconography, but I would have hoped the encounter design would at least subtley-but-not-too-subtley explain how it wants you to play. Despite the slog, there are some very excellent stretches here; Enough to give you hope, but not enough to completely turn things around.
Scorn could be greatly improved with a single patch that addresses some of the game's balance and features like Ultrawide support or an FoV slider. As far as I can tell, this is Ebb Software's debut title and though it's uneven throughout, it is nonetheless impressive. Looking back at my screenshots and video clips, it looks even better than I remembered while in-game, and performance was excellent without as much as a single technical mishap. Scenes are consistently framed with an extreme amount of consideration and detail, you could sell me a photobook of just in-game screenshots, and It's not a game I think I will be mentally offloading wholesale any time soon.
All of Scorn's seams really lie with a small handful of very important design decisions that should have gone the other way. I'm eagerly looking forward to whatever this development team has in store next, and I'm not even sure I need it to have either puzzles or combat.
2 Comments
I’ve discovered that Scorn does have an FOV slider, that for no reason is put into the “Controller” settings. So i immediately rescind whatever points I would give back to Scorn for having the FoV slider because come on.
Weatherby
1 year ago