Scorn – Zero Punctuation

And then there is the horror you feel when you find your mum’s used tampon in the waste paper basket. Or when you sit on a recently used toilet and feel another person’s bottom warmth. That’s the school of horror in which today’s subject, Scorn, exclusively operates. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a vision of Scorn, imagine a bottom squashing down on a pre-warmed toilet seat forever. There’s plenty of violence and blood and guts, but it feels less about creating threat and scares and more about putting you off your beetroot sandwich. And as for context. I’d welcome some. Scorn is what happens when the design document for your game is just a picture of H.R. Giger and then a lot of arrows pointing at it. It’s a first person adventure set in an alien world very heavily inspired by Giger’s characteristic style, i.e., biomechanical penises and vaginas as far as the eye can see, and we play a dude with no mouth. Maybe we’re a prisoner of an ironic hell for people who really like oral sex. Or maybe you’re a lost visitor to a strange, long forgotten realm from the darkest nightmares of a chained god. Or maybe you’re the fucking night janitor at the Serbian dildo factory. Who knows.

There’s no dialogue or much explanation of anything, because this is “Stylish Visual Art: The Game,” you’re only supposed to be drinking in the sights and the atmosphere and not asking unhelpful questions like where’s my mouth gone. The goal is, explore and solve puzzles until we tell you to stop, and try not to play while eating the leftovers from last night’s trip to the Italian restaurant. Some might call Scorn a first person shooter. But that’s only the case if Silent Hill 2 is an action brawler, or Borderlands 3 is fun. Sure, Scorn has the framework of a first person shooter in that it’s first person and you shoot things in it, but if you’re expecting an FPS you’re going to come away disappointed. Especially when you’re about two hours in and haven’t fired a single shot, just drifted around some corridors that look like their style guide was the inside of a dead dog’s mouth, and pulled a bunch of levers that did a variety of horrible things to a sweaty bloke with the bodily proportions of an inexpertly carved turducken. But you’ll be understandably confused, especially when you open the pause menu again and the game makes sure you remember what the reload and weapon quick select keys are.

You do eventually get a weapon, an organic pink skin tube you hold in your hands with a default melee attack where it thrusts forward. It’s tricky to judge the effective range on it, because it looks to be about three inches but my protagonist keeps insisting it’s eight inches for some reason. So this sets the tone for a combat element doing the classic survival horror thing where it’s deliberately slow and awkward and difficult to get through unscathed. Fun though it might’ve been to strafe and double jump our way around biomechanical sex dungeons shooting teeth out of our revolving minigun penis, that wouldn’t gel with the solemn, oppressive vibe this game is ejaculating towards. So our character is slow and low on defenses and basically can’t dodge any attack he didn’t see coming at least nine minutes before it started, health and ammo are scarce and we reload like we’re delicately arranging vol-au-vents around a serving platter, and that’s after we finally figure out which unlabeled set of wall-mounted genitals dispenses ammo, and which health, and which are just background decor. You haven’t known embarrassment until you’ve been caught demanding your money back from a light fixture for not giving you any spunk bullets.

So I understand the intention, but for me the combat element crosses the line where intentional sense of vulnerability and dread becomes just plain annoying. It might be because there’s no way to avoid or flee from combat, the environments are generally claustrophobic and if the way is blocked by a lumbering bloodstained cock and balls on legs you’re going to have to deal with it. And then you die because you were trying to get out of the way of a vomit attack but walked into a flap of decorative foreskin that extruded two inches from the ground and your dude had to stop dead while they count their number of legs. So the combat isn’t really the core of the game, that would be the environmental puzzles where you explore the horrible disgusting level deducing what horrible disgusting order you need to activate all the horrible disgusting machinery, and that’s more akin to something like a Myst or a Riven if it was primarily set in the carcass of a giant chicken that died of illicit farmhand buggery. And if you ever stop playing and come back to it after a few days you might as well just restart the game ‘cos you’ll have no fingerblasting clue where you were or what you were in the middle of doing.

Which I put down to uninteresting environment design. Yeah, yeah, ooh, haunting, nightmarish, walls of spines, that house over there simultaneously resembles a face, a scrotum and a disassembled motorbike, but frankly I get a bit of the sensory overload problem, the extensive detailing everywhere you look turns into white noise after a while, and I can’t remember which corridors resembling giant inside-out ribbed condoms I’ve already been down. The odd thing about all this is how crushingly banal Scorn feels in retrospect. You get the sense that you’re a tiny helpless thing moving through a gigantic industrial machine that’s just pointlessly and emotionlessly torturing you as part of a forgotten production line. And then at the end of the plot you get reclaimed by the horror in a way that suggests there was never any real chance of escape, and it’s hard to know how to feel. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how much the crappy feeling we’re left with is intended and how much is just the game being crappy. Let’s just say it’s certainly a haunting wander around a Francis Bacon art gallery sort of experience, just not one you’d take a school field trip to. Not unless the teen pregnancy rate is up and you’re trying to ingrain a few hangups.