This cyclical motif is sewn throughout Scorn, running through it like a rotting umbilical cord.
At the end, there are statues in, uh, compromising positions.
Swollen abdomens and yes, more umbilical cords.
Subtle this is not.
Scorn review
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Scorn is ripe with phallic imagery and actions.
Giger and Zdzislaw Beksiński.
And it’s dark, too; figuratively and thematically.
Sure - there was plenty of that.
And I can’t help but admit just a sliver of disappointment at that.
Yes, these puzzles are deliberately opaque.
No, you will not get a hint.
Yes, you will be frustrated but yes, you will solve it in the end.
Some will be environmental.
Some you’ll work through methodically, step by step.
Other times, success may be an accident, a side-effect of brute force or idle experimentation.
You’re always making progress, even when it feels like you’re not.
Alas, if only obscure puzzling was the most frustrating thing I encountered in Scorn.
As my time here should attest, I play a lot of shooters.
But I cannot get to grips with the combat in Scorn.
It was really weird and, for obvious reasons, incredibly frustrating.
Every time I respawned, I was stuck in the same animation and died.
I want to love Scorn.
On paper, Ishouldlove Scorn.
It’s a slow, thoughtful, atmospheric sci-fi horror - my favourite!
It looks even better.
But it embodies the very definition of style over substance.
I fall somewhere in the middle.
I love Scorn for its atmosphere, its light-touch storytelling, its world-building, and confident hands-off puzzling.
