‘I permit you to wander like an eyeless insect in a world of death,” wrote Harlan Ellison in his seminal sci-fi horror work, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. First-person puzzler Scorn’s rotting biomechanical hellscapes impart a similar permission, imposing a paranoia on play as if you’re simply being allowed to wander its world, on a short leash, at the behest of some terrible intelligence. It’s a world you enter flayed and emaciated, journeying from bleakness to a transcendent despair I haven’t felt since Pascal Laugier’s notorious horror film, Martyrs.
The developer describes the setting as “a nightmarish universe of odd forms and somber tapestry” and that’s perhaps all you need to know of the world or its narrative. Pain is constant. Fear is everywhere. Respite only brings violent melancholy. Scorn is an incredibly evocative work of art and the things it evokes are so unpleasant I had to ration it out in hour-long sessions throughout a week of play.
Ellison was labelled a technophobe (something he would later deny), but that’s an accusation you’d have a hard time laying at the feet of Ebb Software. Scorn often feels like a grim celebration of the immersive qualities of consumingly realised virtual worlds. We talk about games being “unforgettable”, but some of the things I’ve seen in Scorn have surely left imprints on my psyche. It has, like Hellraiser’s Cenobites, such sights to show you.
Sights grotesque and surrealist, yes, but like the art of HR Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński that it takes much inspiration from, there’s an undeniable truth to it all. A logical verisimilitude of the horrors we inflict upon ourselves and one another. A satirical, gruesome portraiture of the human body as fleshy sprockets and leaking fluids used to lubricate grinding, insatiable industry. While I’m sure its inspirations run a lot wider, it’s hard not to see some imprint of the game’s gruelling decade-long dev cycle left in the horrific marriages of meat and machinery that populate the decaying city.
Progressing through its spaces, in an attempt to find some meaning to grasp on to, involves solving puzzles. As your primary means of interfacing with the world, these problems allow an odd kind of familiarity – a shared language of logic with an otherwise alien world. Or, to be less charitable, an occasionally dampening, mundane intrusion on the fantastic. Not that these are bad logic puzzles – some are quite satisfying. It’s just nothing sucks you out of a nightmare like being forced to solve an elaborate version of a marble maze. It can sometimes feel like Ebb had trouble placing interactive hurdles between one location and the next.
And yet, it’s easy to forgive with locations such as this. Cyclopean. Sepulchral. Each formidably vast, yet curated down to the smallest, squirming detail. It’s not just the sense that everything is aeons old, it’s that aeons seem to pass before your eyes, chapter to chapter. Brief combat encounters are tense but sparse, and neither a highlight nor detriment, although creature design is enjoyably gruesome. Not an acquired taste, then, but an unequivocally bitter one, engineered with such bold artistry you’ll wince as you go back in for seconds.
• Scorn is released on 14 October for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X, £30
