Grossed out? Sure - there was plenty of that. To be clear, this isn't a criticism - I'm never happier than playing a jump scare-free horror - but combat aside (more on that in a bit) I never felt uneasy. There are no cheap spooks or jump scares, and instead, it relies on an ominous soundtrack and its (admittedly brilliant) environmental cues to ratchet up the tension. That's not to say Scorn is a horror, though it's not, at least, not in the way some think of horror these days. Watch on YouTube Here's a couple minutes of a gameplay walkthrough to give you a sense of Scorn's overwhelming vibe. There are claustrophobic corridors where the walls look like they're constructed from bone and skin, and you can't shake the feeling that the track on the ground below your bare feet looks more like a spine than a transport system. Scorn's sickly pallor is often interrupted by a shock of scarlet, haphazard piles of miscellaneous meat - meat that used to think and feel - discarded carelessly in corners.

It is stunningly disgusting and disgustingly stunning in all the right ways and for all of Scorn's faults - and I have a few, I'm afraid - its meticulously detailed aesthetic is not one of them.Īnd it's dark, too figuratively and thematically. There are holes and tubes and thrusting pistons - enough to make Freud blush - all openly inspired by the nightmare dreamscapes of the grimly delightful H.R.

Our protagonist - a half-dead husk of a humanoid roaming around a (mostly) deserted alien world - endlessly thrusts their weapon into mysterious holes and sinks their fingers into fleshy control panels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Scorn is ripe with phallic imagery and actions. Availability: Out 14 October on PC and Xbox Series X/S (Game Pass).Swollen abdomens and yes, more umbilical cords. At the end, there are statues in, uh, compromising positions.

Before you're out of the opening hour, you will have pried a deformed form from a rotting egg and ripped an organic weapon from its umbilical holster moments before you're soaked in a thick, milky substance so overwhelming, it knocks you out. It's a world where animal and automation are fused together in an uneasy alliance, blended so seamlessly you're never entirely sure where organic matter ends and machine begins.įor such a taciturn game - Scorn has no text prompts, no dialogue, and no map you move through its world by organic exploration, hope, luck, and nothing more - this circle-of-life stuff is surprisingly in your face.

This cyclical motif is sewn throughout Scorn, running through it like a rotting umbilical cord. There is no birth without sex, no life without birth, no birth without life, and no life without death. In Scorn, a game of wonderfully horrible atmosphere and smart, hands-off puzzling is undermined by some dodgy checkpoints and wonky combat.

Jump king speedrun