Review of the horror adventure inspired by Scorn, Giger, Barker and Cronenberg

Journey to horror: If we had to choose four words to describe his signature horror adventure Ebb Softwarethese would be. There’s been a lot of talk about HR Giger’s influence on Scorn’s design, but other names came to mind during the game’s short campaign: Clive Barker and the deformed flesh of David Cronenberg and Videodrome, one of Hellraiser’s fearsome cenobites.

Visually, the work created by the Serbian team is eerie both for what is shown and for the voices that accompany the story and are mostly moaning, expressing a narrative that needs no words. a possible salvation against the backdrop of an alien, desolate and monstrous world.

Really interesting assumptions, sure, but does a solid project suit you in all aspects? We tell you about it in this thread contempt review.

History

We just said: History Scorn does not make use of dialogues or documents, but emerges as the embodiment of a desperate path consumed between the disturbing corridors of a gigantic structure with alien appearances. The character we control is a man who wakes up in this mysterious place without fully understanding how and how long ago he got there.

What drives him is the faint hope that there is a way out somewhere, that there is still a normal world to return to, or that it is possible to escape the fear and horror that clings to every inch of the scenario. . The narration is purely visual and we can give it a different rhythm by choosing to move more or less quickly. duration The duration of the game is six hours.

It’s not a particularly exciting figure in the face of the selling price, but in the end we imagine it’s a somewhat symbolic figure: on the one hand, because different rules apply for this type of production and we tend to take it more into account. the intensity of the experience, not the actual playing time; on the other hand, it will be offered to Scorn subscribers at no additional cost. Xbox Game Pass As of release and it is clear that the vast majority of users will try it this way.

Gameplay

Side GameplayScorn basically stands as a first-person adventure with a wink at survival horror. You don’t encounter enemies or handle weapons for most of the intro phase, but the most traumatic are certainly the first hours, naturally we refer to that pathetic way of life that was once human and that we will have to bear. He said he was in a car and wouldn’t fail to beg and groan with his eyes as he was about to irresistibly sacrifice her to move forward.

this crossword It forms the mainstay of progress: the enormous structure of mechanisms, cages, elevators, and slimy terminals that form the backdrop of the countryside, a mixture of biological tissues and metal interact with the painful grafting of an appendix in the left hand. and, in turn, trying to figure out what needs to be done to solve another puzzle of the scenario’s increasing complexity and which in itself represents an element of challenge.

From this perspective, Ebb Software’s approach is roughly as brutal as the world in which Scorn takes place: no indication or information, we will have to figure out for ourselves what to do and how to do it, which switches can be activated and which are not, but first of all why. At the beginning, we will feel lost just like the hero of the game, scattered inside what appears to be a maze of tunnels and rooms, more or less similar, but segmented structure will help us get an idea of ​​each one. map.

Then there warhowever, this turns out to be the least successful part of the experience. Gradually, more powerful means of attack will be provided, from a “piston” with very slow reloading to a rifle that adapts the distribution of fire to the distance; from a devastating “hat trick” to a grenade launcher. We will only be able to collect ammunition in certain warehouses and in a very limited number of ammunition, meanwhile the poor creatures (three or four types, plus a single boss) roaming the positions can do us great harm, and often and willingly determine our death.

We had some problems with it. checkpointThis forced us to repeat a fairly long chapter several times in a central phase of the campaign as there was little vital energy and few bullets left: a nightmare situation where the game didn’t want to steal us and the game didn’t want to steal us. It can give life to very nerd rescues where you go through trial and error to overcome certain sequences without the ability to withstand even a single blow.

Even the eventual recharge of health is, in fact, managed sparingly, without abandoning fear and dread and rather giving us some sort of starfish to “squeeze” if necessary to regain some energy. Would it be better to manage them all with auto-recovery when I’m safe? Absolutely, and we add: perhaps it would be better not to include at all the fights, which immediately turned out to be woody and approximate.

Technical realization

If the goal of the Scorn developers is to create a terrifying, impactful visual experience like very few others in the video game space, they’ve certainly succeeded. Almost every graphic element in the game, fear and restlessness: rods that look like vertebrae, because they’re actually vertebrae, the pathetic creatures we’ll encounter along the way, the monstrous parasite that will at some point chase us (literally) to get stuck in our guts, etc.

From this point enemies are a bit disappointed, neither meat nor fish, but the scenarios exist to keep the level high, with their claustrophobic architecture but also the hopeless desolation of empty and open spaces; and especially the “cathedral” seen in the final stages of the campaign, with its perverse bas-reliefs that seem to tell the story of how the world turned into hell and the plague that eventually assimilated everyone.

We played Scorn on PC, and in terms of effects, the game brings nothing surprising to the field, quite the contrary, it reverts to an old-gen sense of being (the choice not to bring the title to Xbox One is surprising), Unreal Engine 4’s well-known reliability, i 60fps stable in our configuration too 4K real and all qualitative presets set to the maximum, without introducing any ambiguity.

Finally, a few words soundIt’s very important in terms of musical accompaniment, it’s almost non-existent, but it does an excellent job in terms of design and effects, among the screams, groans and sounds that will help us turn our stay in the mystery game scenario into a nightmarish experience.