There are spoilers all over in here. I can’t be bothered to write about this without spoiling shit. I also can’t help swearing about it all. The more I attempted to put to word my feelings about the experience, the more I found myself swearing. I found myself hearing Steph Sterling’s voice in my head as I read what I was writing. I’m not quite sure why. Their review of “Scorn” was pretty minimal and passionless. If that helps you read any of this, cool. If it hurts, well, [shrug]. I tried to post this on Steam, but:
- Too much text, not enough characters to post it. Fair enough. This is a lot, and it’s a massive critique beyond gaming.
- FUCK STEAM on Mac OS. It goddamned behaves like a fucking website in a web browser, and they haven’t bothered to attend to Mac OS keyboard commands and shortcuts for editing text (using the cmd+arrow keys to move around in your text WILL destroy your efforts)
Story:
There sort of is one, but mostly there isn’t. It’s sort of the suggestion of a story, which is really just a bit of world-building, with lots of room for interpretation… unless you’re really compelled by logical analysis, because then it starts to make less sense than it did before you tried to understand any of it. It makes less sense the more details you extract from the game’s developers, too, which is kind of an interesting fete accompli. I will admit that part of the problem is personal: I find the implications outlandishly nihilistically stupid. The bigger problem is getting to these implications.
I hate when “stories” are made this way: There’s ultimately very little in the way of explanation for much inside the game, and only slightly more behind the scenes. It becomes clear that the creators just threw cool shit at you, refined it in some ways, to string it together into the illusion of world-building, and then bungled some of those things because not all of that cool shit fits with the other pieces of cool shit. Then they went and left it that way and called it “art”, because goddamn it this is hard work and it’s easier to call something cool and mysterious “art” than it is to actually work it all out before you sell it at people.
No, Scornguys, you need more than that. That’s not mysterious. That is pseudo-intellectual laziness [waves at “Lost”].
A good mystery is one that HAS logical answers to most questions the audience could ask about what was presented, even if the author doesn’t provide them all directly. I mean, you really should provide a couple of clear answers, but you don’t have to provide all, or even many of them to provide a good mystery. A good mystery is one that should let the audience work it out via what is provided to them inside the work (be that a book, movie, or, not in this case, a game). The visually rich mess that is “Scorn” is initially quite interesting to me, and I eagerly slung my mind around various ideas (more interesting than what I ultimately was given) while looking at what it showed me, wondering why and how… but that eventually gave way to annoyance. I suspect it would do so for many people who find themselves compelled to understand what they’re seeing; those who try to put pieces together to find the story that the developers claim is there.
No matter how many theories we players come up with, the pieces will never properly fit, because they weren’t designed to, and the creators of it are fine with that. They imply that this is the intended outcome and that things don’t have to come together. They keep saying how this is an “art” experience… which is confusing, because they built what is functionally operated like a game and told us the environment would tell us a story. I say “confusing”, but what I really mean is “incorrect”, but I guess this is me saying my opinion is superior to the opinion of the people who built the fucking thing, and maybe I’m not sure if I have that right. It’s all subjective, right?
People make, and excuse, entire TV series like this, usually to string along an audience of commercial watchers [waves at “Lost” again]. “Scorn” is a fairly short experience as a game, but it was a very long experience as an internet-based hype entity. It spent years in development, wherein they presented several visually impressive videos and “gameplay demos”, and then years in re-development, and more videos. It was ambitious, and then it was truncated. Then it was supposedly restored to a “complete story” and completed, but when you read the art book, you find out that a lot of things were cut anyway, because it was time-consuming, and also had been made redundant by things they changed elsewhere (which tells me about how this game spent more time being repeatedly refashioned than it did being planned).
A movie or TV show that was thrown together without a plan can be annoying, but I just discovered that it’s a lot MORE annoying when placed into the protagonist’s shoes (well, Scornguy’s bare feet), putting out ALL the effort to manipulate him through his various tasks (that he seemed to know he needed to do, even though we the player did not). For a movie or TV show, we expend only the mental effort of making sense of chunks of half-baked random shit they throw at us. We don’t operate a set of game controls to work out obscure mechanical puzzles, or try to figure out why we cannot progress to the next scene.
Regardless of the theories put forth by the audience of a product thrown together rather than thoroughly planned, there will always be contradictions, and overly-complicated retcons and mental gymnastics required to “resolve” those contradictions. It is undesirable, and even somewhat offensive, in a movie or show that I’ve invested my time into, but this process of doing the work the author fails to do felt much more offensive when I had to exert physical effort playing a game, in a first-person-perspective. It made it more personal, and once you get beyond marveling at the game’s visual design, coming to feel that “Scorn” is a personal experience is a negative.
Okay, okay: not right away, and maybe, for other players, not at all. I get it; I’ve had a subjective experience here, and that’s what I’m ranting about. Rant continues…
Cinematics and Tone:
This game is a fantastic visual feast (and it even ran well on my 2017 iMac). It set up some amazing-looking locations (if you think spooky and desolate hellscapes and nightmare fuel is amazing), and some really thick atmosphere… until it became a slog of rushing through some spaces to avoid being attacked by malignant creatures that have inexplicable hostility, which players have no effective defence against, other than “run away and wait for them to wander off into a hole, awkwardly” (way more awkwardly than in the promotional videos). I remember the developers saying “the creatures mostly just want to be left alone”, and I was fine with that, except they also sometimes seemed to want to attack me just for being there (but not in the ways that were really well animated in the promotional videos, because, reasons). Other times, they were clearly sent after me by the crater’s primary occupant (and in those cases, I definitely fucking asked for it, because that creature did nothing at all to me until I operated controls that brutalized the poor thing, and this is part of the required game progression making you do these horrible things to it).
Gameplay:
Did I mention the cruelty we are forced to carry out in order to progress? Oh I guess I just did. One example of said cruelty is sort of a trick to get you to kill some poor sod because the designs of the two different machines you’re directed to take him to will imply the best choice, the one that seems less likely to be lethal, is a trick. “HAH, WE FOOLED YOU! Look how you butchered that poor, helpless, gimpy, big-eyed, innocent fucker.”
Luckily I knew this was the game’s one and only “choice”, and that one machine was non-lethal (it’s debatable whether the outcome is kinder). I worked out which of the two machines was most likely to be lethal only because I’d seen someone play this part online last year, and reasoned that the other, seemingly more lethal-looking machine, must be the non-lethal choice. I’m glad I worked that out before being made to feel horrible about my choice, but this is the only case where I was able to exercise any agency over this character’s actions. Everything else has to be done in order to progress, and it doesn’t matter whether those actions seem justified or like the compulsions of a mindless but highly complex instinct, where the task is all that matters, and any flesh that is maimed in the process is unimportant (especially if it looks ugly, and pretty much that’s all there is in this world: ugliness).
Then there are the totally arbitrary puzzles to solve. Some things would be somewhat reasonable to find in a real world setting, I suppose, and others… well, without the claim of a mystical mad scientist on the island making crazy puzzles for the sake of puzzles… it makes no sense for them to be in this game, nor to do the things they do. This is… security by obscurity and irritation, I guess?
Evading lethal attacks and solving dumb puzzles greatly takes away from admiring the environment… an environment that is suspiciously linear in how things are laid out, including the things that are communicated as being decay and accidental. Oh, how convenient that I can only move through this space in one specific manner, despite the architecture being full of other pathways.
About that linear path: the gatekeeping is increasingly irritating and irrational. There are places where literal gates often weren’t even legitimate obstructions. You could clearly just step around them, across a slightly raised or sunken bit of structure, something that all of us who aren’t wheelchair-bound can easily do in the real world… but Scornguy wont. Making this even more insulting is that the developers show him squeezing through tight spaces here and there as part of scripted movements, such as to get inside the building in chapter 2, but then he refuses to ever squeeze around anything else when we want him to do so. It’s often literally just a matter of stepping or climbing over a VERY LOW, clearly-navigable object or objects. But no, Scornguy is kind of on rails, and the environment is decayed and collapsed in all the right ways to corral him into a set path… except for where that path is betrayed by invisible walls, where you could CLEARLY just step over something or around something if you were actually there in the flesh. Scornguy just WONT. There’s even a “puzzle” that involves melting a smallish pile of dead mold men just to progress through a corridor. Why are they there? Why the fuck is there a system available in this spot to melt them?
As is often the case, the answer to “why” is nothing more than “because”. The environmental design and puzzles are functionless and illogical inside the world, and make sense ONLY as a linear cattle chute and as puzzles for game players to solve. In other words, they only have non-diegetic functions, despite being clearly diegetic objects in the physical world. They’d be extremely bad choices from a usability standpoint if they served a diegetic function, in an actual world, lived in and operated by actual people.
That was where I started to sense that the game makers didn’t really KNOW exactly what their own world was all about and had changed their minds A LOT about it over the years of building it. So many interesting things presented in trailers that they ultimately left out, claiming to have never been meant to be part of the game. Sometimes I think it’s just an excuse: “it’s not that we left this out or suddenly changed our minds, we just meant this as a demonstrative set piece”. Suuuuure you did. As with a number of other things they presented and claimed at various times over the years, it does not read as truthful in the end. That could be because it isn’t, or that could be because they sucked at setting expectations. Either way, the end result for the game’s followers over the years is the same: we feel mislead. I don’t think this was malignant. It just feels like failure and retconning.
Then there’s the combat. I think I’ll get back to that later (and everyone else has talked about it ad nausea), but here’s a teaser: the combat also reads as failure and retcon.
Story Again:
My grasp of the world started with “this was a once-great civilization that died out, possibly because they couldn’t solve their own inter-species conflicts, or encountered an outside force that killed them.” I spent a lot of time looking at things to understand what their purposes were, trying to understand this “story” they were allegedly telling with the environment. This was challenging but sort of exciting in the first chapter. There were signs of horrific genocide, and systems left to decay and corruption. These systems seemed to be designed for callous purposes. Nothing was particularly clear, but, okay, I’ll keep going and learn what I can as I go along.
The second chapter made it difficult to really look around, and the environment’s function became even more vague or outright arbitrary. That’s also when the cattle chute progression ramped up and the hostile creatures came into it. This forces players to spend much less time examining the environment for that “environmental storytelling” in order to survive within it, scrambling to the next save checkpoint (and what a GARBAGE system; had I known I could just quit and save right where I was, I would have stopped playing it at MANY more points and just walked away for a while). So, here I am talking about gameplay mechanics when I was supposed to be talking about the story again. That’s kinda my point.
I had no problem grasping the change in player character, which was clever, nor difficulty grasping that time had passed between the first and second chapters. It was at first confusing. I thought it was a flashback, but that was clearly not the case, the further along I went. Okay. That’s kinda cool. Disappointingly, the evidence for said passage of time was held at a distance. I had to intently look around and stare at dimly lit, distant objects, to try to see if there was a clear sign of decay (there was, but the game does not call attention to it).
“Oh, that’s interesting,” thought I. “What became of the mold man I left stuck to that door control? Did he find his way, thanks to having that tool on his wrist? Did he die there of dehydration? Did he maybe start his own little clan of mold men from other survivors possibly tucked away like he had been (maybe start reproducing with the female mold men that seem to be the only clear cases of female anybody in this game)? How long do these guys live? CAN they live longer than the time it takes to grow one? Just how much decay has there been to the environment that might suggest the timespan?” So many questions! The game’s response?
“Who cares? Shut up and walk way over there, because that’s the only way to progress in this game.”
The chapter seems to tell us that the accident at the end of the previous chapter caused the invasive organism infestation. Until it doesn’t anymore. I can’t tell if that’s a retcon or bad design from the start. There’s no clear progression from any source. Things we find later on imply that the parasite is an expected consequence of… something… And then the art book tells us that the source of these miserable flesh creatures is at the bottom of the “crater”, and was specifically used by the beings that built all of this stuff.
Wait. That sad and mournful thing was INTENDED to be there? Well, why, then, does this queen creature appear to have taken over an abandoned machine that it gets horribly brutalized by when Scornguy needs to open doors in his linear progression? Where it’s hanging out doesn’t seem to be where it belongs. It made sense as an infection taking over a defunct facility, not as a breeding queen that was supposed to be there.
Speaking of breeding: Not only is the lifecycle of each creature entirely unclear (the player theories I’ve seen, combined with the art book, imply nature was replaced by design, but there are a LOT of liberties being taken here if that’s the case), there’s also no ecosystem present to suggest from where they all get their biomass and water. You could say they’re feeding off the decaying biomechanical structures. Fine, I guess. But how long have they been doing this? When did everything shut down? What is alive and what is dead? Why are there so many deceased biomechanical devices, but the specific ones Scornguy needs to use are all perfectly serviceable until he exhausts their supplies? Why don’t those supplies get replenished? If everything is organic, are these things not just growing more resources based on whatever feeds them?
There are two functional mold man pods in the factory, and the decay of everyone’s bodies seems to be minimal, yet the factory seems to have been decaying for decades or more. There’s also a mold man who seems to have JUST died when your second Scornguy arrives at the place where they’re piled up everywhere. Why is that? What was he up to? Why did he die? Hell, how and why was he alive?
How does Scornguy and his kind fuel their own bodies with no mouth to eat or drink? The health fluid taken in by the needle on his wrist tool implies an artificial sustenance mechanism, except that means he’s dependent on a device he seemed to freak out about acquiring. It also implies that there is only enough of that stuff left in this whole facility for just him and nobody else who comes after (there are other pods that have not opened, so, someone will probably fall out of those and either die from the fall or make their way to the lie of shelter that is the factory or crater). Or is Scornguy only meant to live long enough to expend his adult body? Why does he have intestines, if he does not eat or drink? Are they vestigial? Can a creature have a vestigial digestive system and teeth, but NOT an orifice like a mouth? Is the mouth engineered away for some reason? Then why not engineer away the intestines? Are they a mute species with telepathy? There’s apparently a total lack of writing anywhere in the environment.
Why was Scornguy grown in the first place? How old is he? Did he only just become sentient? Wait wait wait: How does he KNOW to carry out the long and laborious sets of tasks he seems to be set on? Why is that seemingly a very different mission from the one being done by the first Scornguy in chapter 1?
The more I played, the more questions I had. The “story” falls apart at any examination, as happens when the people who build fictional worlds do so without actually deciding what the answers are. I’m not saying a working story can’t be crafted by building things in a nonlinear, haphazard, explorative fashion via impression/suggestion. That’s actually a method I’ve been using now and then with my own attempts at writing. The difference is that I would never offer up a “story” that demands my readers solve things I never bothered to solve myself, or to craft parts of the world I did not bother to craft myself, in order for it to make sense to them as they read it.
Chapter 3: The Third Belabored Bag of Nonsensical Tasks:
When I got to Polis, my impression shifted from “…a once-great civilization that died out…” to a much less interesting impression: “Oh, wait, maybe this civilization failed because they were lead by a bunch of cultists who just let it all fall apart when they retreated into some fantasy world, or left somehow, without their original bodies. But wait… all of this crap over here makes no sense with that explanation, unless they’re just really fucking stupid and awful, and awfully stupid.”
The text of the art book basically confirms that there’s no good reason for anything we see here. The logic is impossible to find because there IS NO logic to it. The creators of the game never fully worked it out, but they offered their impressions of what they built, which I will word thusly: “This was a terminally psychotic civilization that deserved to die out. They were horrific and stupid, and had no redeeming qualities. They self-extinguished by configuring their entire civilization to carry out an elite caste’s unsustainable pain-as-pleasure ritual, for a few select members to spend ‘eternity’ wired to an overgrowth of brain matter in a decaying church, as some kind of ascension from the mortal realm.”
Apparently this plan involves each elite member fighting infant-sized malignant mutant assholes in unconvincing “cybernetic” mech suits because… you have to extract their fluids in a pressing machine, and they’re easier to stuff into the juicer when dead. Let’s just accept this nonsense makes sense somehow (it fucking does not), the next question is: “Why not just kill and juice them from the start? Why willfully insert them into impenetrable battle machines (that conveniently have specific moments of vulnerability), and then struggle to defeat them?” There’s no clear diegetic explanation. It seems to be entirely because they needed a boss fight to make the game’s kickstarter backers happy, and people have retconned that this fight is part of the ritual. Scornguy had to win his legitimacy.
Which does not align with anything else in this mess of “environmental storytelling”. I mean, sure, he has to survive a hellscape, but it would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw that, had he not woken up as the last gasp of a dead civilization, the factory and the crater would have been functional places, not collapsing and diseased gauntlets to survive. He had to travel a crazy distance to get to Polis’ dumb little Master-Blaster Thunderdome room to fight these malignant little “engineers” (so the art book calls them, claiming that they’re highly intelligent and intellectual, and yeah, that’s not fucking true at all because all they do is scowl at you in jars and then try to kill you for no reason other than… they maybe don’t want to be pulped and used as some kind of blood donation to the host bodies in the other room).
It’s all just. so. stupid.
Taking it at face value… er… retconned, half-assed, need-the-book to semi-complete the vague impressionist painting’s value: Yes, this civilization deserved to die out, but why did I have to spend all this goddamned time and effort on getting to that point? What if I hadn’t bought that art book? All this to learn, somewhat off-screen, that this civilization was a bunch of terminally stupid nihilistic assholes. Why did I have to play as the last few [inconsistent] members of this civilization, to experience a final gasp of seemingly compulsive stupidity that ends with “no, actually, SCREW YOU, GUY” at the last second, as if that’s somehow deep and philosophical?
I mean, sure, if it didn’t cost me all this effort to get there, maybe I could celebrate Scornguy’s thwarting, and feel it was a justified outcome, once I understood what this was all about. But, no, that isn’t inside the narrative, and is barely in the art book. There IS NO narrative. I went into this game with the spoiler of knowing “he doesn’t have a happy ending, because he doesn’t deserve one”, and I STILL found the ending extremely irritating.
You want to make a point of this civilization being a bunch of psychotic assholes?
Fine.
You want to show it from the perspective of one of the last of these assholes, and suggest that anyone innocent or redeemable is long dead?
Okay. Why not?
Why not… Well, maybe not, because it all feels like it cheapens the Giger-inspired majesty of biomechanical stuff. These were psychopathic idiots who literally murdered themselves to death.
But, whatever. Sure. Assholes made amazing stuff, and used it to do stupid horrible things. That’s certainly a possibility. They managed to do far more amazing shit than we have, during the process of self-destructing, and we should not worship their accomplishments because they were fucking psychopathic assholes.
FINE.
Just do that on someone ELSE’S effort! Present it as a movie or a TV series. Do it in third-person perspective, where we can distance ourselves from feeling responsible for the shit these assholes do/did. Not as a game where you’ve put me into the body of one of these mindless assholes and then I have to suffer WITH him (and then be shown he gets off on evisceration near the end) as he gets thwarted five feet from… whatever that was. Ascension? A mere finish line?
I don’t need to be embodied by, forced to identify with, and expected to semi-direct the actions of this last asshole from a civilization of terminal assholes.
I don’t like movies or shows like this either, but I can at least separate myself from the actions of these assholes when I’m watching a plot play out in third-person that’s not demanding I put MY OWN effort into making stupid or brutal things happen, while also doing the work of explaining to myself what the hell any of it even means in the first place, and motivating myself to KEEP SLOGGING ALONG because… uh… I need to finish the game.
Visuals Do Not A Game Make:
The world is so incredibly visually interesting that I actually want to go through it again, even though I HATED so much of the first time that I played through it (no, watching YouTube play-throughs was NOT satisfying since people seem to rush through the environments as quickly as possible). I hated several of the puzzles (and probably completed them by sheer dumb luck), I hated being given weapons to defend myself, when they’re better off being hardly used at all, I hated creeping around paying more attention to being attacked than admiring the environment, and I hated repeating the same actions every time I got killed because some necessary game mechanic is beyond clumsy. It LOOKS amazing, if you like artwork inspired by Giger and Beksiński, but it plays like it’s meant to piss off players with slow, tedious, stupidity. That is the opposite of what the goal is in making a game, by the way. It’s either a failure on the part of the developers, or they’re being assholes to the player as well as to the creatures in the world they’ve half-crafted.
At this point in my rant, I had launched into questions about Polis and the torture chairs in the [still visually stunning] cathedral, but what’s the point? Nothing makes much sense at all. What they tell us in the game and the book is internally inconsistent, contradictory, and/or JUST PLAIN FUCKING DUMB. It’s one thing to imagine a civilization can get to THIS level of accomplished narcissism, but it’s another thing entirely to make us spend time as one of the last nihilistic narcissists to trudge through their dumb fucking ritual immediately after he is supposedly born (with full knowledge of his dumb task, it seems).
Why do I want to toil in a world with zero nobility or redeeming qualities? There’s no hint that there ever were any, aside from the civilization’s technical accomplishments, which seem to be perverted into a horror-show of abuse and murder, and which might not be all that spectacular after all: The book suggests that the biomechanical structures were shaped from the parts of the mold men they grew as slaves/raw resources. So the notion that these structures and buildings were GROWN as living technology might not even be the case. This is far stupider than structures that are grown into place: how does an assembly of body parts and bone persist if they’re not a living organism with systems of nutrient delivery and immunity to decay?
“It’s just a sci-fi/horror game!” you scream.
I’m not good with the “anything goes because sci-fi” excuse. When you craft a world, it has to maintain willing suspension of disbelief, not continuously spit in its face.
Why would I want to drag my ass through a world where some dumb assholes wasted all of their resources (possibly killing their planet) in order to build a cult-like masturbatory self-destruction industry? It feels gross to be a part of it as a player character. I’m not a prude who can’t read art. I’m a rational person that is offended to my core that I have to be forced into participating in a society that is THIS FUCKING NARCISSISTICALLY STUPID. We already live in a real society that is doing enough stupid shit we need to stop doing. We have enough people trying to prevent others from exercising their own bodily autonomy. Do we need to play a game that takes this to a fantastically gross level just to make… some… kind of … what point is there?
The art book’s worst revelation is that this isn’t an alien planet with human-like beings doing all this stupid shit. It’s “our world”, taken to an extreme future stage of … what? Total alienness and depravity? Why make it humanity’s eventual descendants? How is this artful commentary when it’s this far abstracted from what any of us know as contemporary humans? It feels like pseudo-intellectualism:
“Why does it seem to make no sense and why is it so unforgivingly cruel?” I ask.
“Well,” the pseudo-intellectual replies, “it’s deep. Trust me. If you can’t understand it, you’re probably just not thinking about it deeply enough. Also: EDGY!!”
There is nothing of value to learn here, at least not through the perspective of one of the beings going through the ritual. It’s not really a cautionary tale, because… I mean… this is all fantasy bullshit, shoehorned onto someone else’s aesthetic. It’s REALLY SUPER COOL to look at, in many places (as a Giger fan), but it’s not a possible outcome for anyone alive today, and likely never (because the technology gets increasingly more implausible as it goes along, until there’s literally a room that says “dead bodies can be pieced together like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and we call them cyborgs, even though you have to try to pretend they are more than chunks of long dead flesh, that seems not to be rotting much at all, that can’t possibly be thrown together to do anything useful”).
There’s nobody in this game world to empathize with, except maybe the thousands of murdered humanoids these assholes supposedly used as raw materials.
[I’m talking about what the developers refer to as “mold men”, because they supposedly come out of a mold. Because… what sense does that make? The mold men, which, if you noticed the bodies in chapter one, they seem to have just suddenly died by the hundreds, not been visibly injured or “used up” (except the pile of mold men near the extraction machine, who seem to have been put in backwards and had their skulls cut into), and there’s no hint of explanation for this, leaving me to guess that they weren’t needed anymore and were poisoned in some way or died of neglect via dehydration/starvation when one of the elites decided to shut down the facilities (it does not look like there was much automation here, and the book indicates slavery was used, so it’s not like the factory kept working on its own and then ground to a halt one day without supervision)]
Any lesson here?
“These were horrible people and they deserved to die out, and we assume it’s too bad EVERYTHING ELSE DIED WITH THEM”.
How fun.
An entire civilization arranged itself into a system of pathological stupidity. Everything was built for the purpose of carrying out a ritual. They bred living beings as raw materials and slave labor. The technology and their demand for artful construction was merely masturbatory hubris.
Oh yay. Who would not clamor to be a part of this tale from inside the flesh of a nihilistic selfish asshole?
Why did we want this?
Did we want this?
Did ANYONE want THIS?
There was probably never a chance of H.R. Giger and Beksiński having their artwork inspire a noble and uplifting story about noble and ethical beings, but, as with “Alien” prequel “Prometheus”, the mystery was betrayed not by answering questions. The mystery was betrayed by providing DUMB FUCKING ANSWERS and making every being in the universe just as shallow, selfish, and lethally stupid as the humans we are today. [Actually, that isn’t how humanity really is! It requires some type of narcissism to believe that humanity is as bad as this. It implies that the people who created this “story”, by implying this, their take on humanity, are themselves ridiculously self-isolated and miserable people.] This is, frankly, an exhausting and beaten-dead horse of a theme. Yes, once again, we are being handed a misanthropic take about the human race, our own species that we’re supposed to hate, because we keep being told humanity sucks.
That’s possibly because we keep failing to regulate our mindless instincts. I mean, sure, that’s definitely a thing. We live that reality, and few people will hold themselves accountable when they’re actually in a position to do something. In “Scorn”, it seems the mindless instincts leading to selfishness and self-aggrandisement of ego have escalated to a would-be comedic level: the point where the Freudian pursuit of death became one with the Freudian pursuit of sex, and the sex torture death ascension to a higher state of being is attained by convoluted rituals. Maybe. I mean, we don’t actually SEE any ascended beings. The art book tells us about them, there’s possibly a wall carving of one in the Polis cathedral, but that’s all. The book does not tell us why we don’t see them in the game. Maybe they are all beyond the veil that Scornguy(s) failed to cross. Who fucking knows.
Oh, but things look all H.R. Giger-ish around here, so at least they had that going for them.
Maybe? Maybe there’s more to it?
Who fucking knows. Probably not. The developers of this visual spectacle have suggested these things, but it’s uncertain, they didn’t do a job (not a good job, not a bad job, just NO job at all) of conveying these things INSIDE the narrative of the game, and, as with “Prometheus”, these interpretations are so contrived as to not be worth the effort to get to the semi-realizations in the first place.
Aftereffects:
I did not HATE playing this game, for the most part. It’s the aftereffects that have me ranting. There was a LOT of time spent ogling the game world, and imagining things more interesting than what they sort-of-but-not-quite reveal to us in the art book that is required to explain the game world, but not really, because it doesn’t. There was also a lot of “FUCK YOU!” at the game when Scornguy couldn’t step over a slight fold in the floor, or step around a minor inconvenience of a “gate”, or squeeze through a generously sizeable opening, or move side to side, or forward or back, or … Especially when under attack from the belligerent Beksiński farm animals wandering the second chapter.
I did NOT hate this game most of the time. I maybe don’t hate the game overall. I am definitely the kind of person who can focus on one superb element (in this case, the visuals) to a degree that it makes up for other, multiple, failures (I am, after all a fairly big fan of Lexx). I have a history of fixating on and appreciating the positive elements in things that failed because of similar problems (looking at you, “Event Horizon”, you fucking asshole of a film).
I wonder how long it will take me to start THIS failed thing again, to torture myself through another run of this game, just to sort of pretend there’s something more … meaningful and grand … about the amazing visual styles that were, if you’re honest about it, really just cribbed from elsewhere and repurposed to exploit the desire many of us have to explore a world that looks like it was built by the builders of the derelict alien spacecraft at the beginning of “Alien” (instead, we got a world built by the retconned cultist assholes of the “Alien” prequel “Prometheus”).
I am glad to have bought “Scorn” while it was on sale. I am glad to have read the art book. It’s cool in a way, and it inserts a couple of half-assed details that bring the WTF-fest of a game into a slightly less incoherent mess, however disappointing and absurd that less incoherent mess is. I am impressed AND pissed off that this was what we’ve gotten, in terms of Giger-inspired games over the years. Impressed because the game really does look amazing (if you like the artists they’ve cribbed). Pissed off because the end product is embarrassingly shallow. “Dark Seed” had a simplistic story, but I didn’t feel bullied and insulted for merely taking on the task of piloting Mike Dawson quite as much as I did being made to drive Scornguy through the mostly-dead remnants of his ancestors’ STUPID STUPID civilization.