{"id":141,"date":"2025-03-18T02:52:20","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T06:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/?p=141"},"modified":"2025-03-18T02:52:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T06:52:20","slug":"my-fucking-review-for-scorn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/my-fucking-review-for-scorn\/","title":{"rendered":"My Fucking Review For Scorn"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are spoilers<\/strong> all over<\/em> in here. I can\u2019t be bothered to write about this without spoiling shit. I also can\u2019t 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\u2019s voice in my head as I read what I was writing. I\u2019m 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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Too much text, not enough characters to post it. Fair enough. This is a lot, and it’s a massive critique beyond gaming.<\/li>\n
  2. 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)<\/li>\n
  3. \"Animated<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Story:<\/h1>\n

    There sort of is one, but mostly there isn\u2019t. It\u2019s sort of the suggestion of a story, which is really just a bit of world-building, with lots of room for interpretation\u2026 unless you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    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 \u201cart\u201d, because goddamn it this is hard work and it\u2019s easier to call something cool and mysterious \u201cart\u201d than it is to actually work it all out before you sell it at people.<\/p>\n

    No, Scornguys, you need more than that. That’s not mysterious. That is pseudo-intellectual laziness [waves at \u201cLost\u201d].<\/p>\n

    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\u2019t provide them all directly. I mean, you really should provide a couple of clear answers, but you don\u2019t 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 \u201cScorn\u201d 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\u2026 but that eventually gave way to annoyance. I suspect it would do so for many people who find themselves compelled to understand what they\u2019re seeing; those who try to put pieces together to find the story that the developers claim is there.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019t have to come together. They keep saying how this is an \u201cart\u201d experience\u2026 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 \u201cconfusing\u201d, but what I really mean is \u201cincorrect\u201d, 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\u2019m not sure if I have that right. It\u2019s all subjective, right?<\/p>\n

    People make, and excuse, entire TV series like this, usually to string along an audience of commercial watchers [waves at \u201cLost\u201d again]. \u201cScorn\u201d 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 \u201cgameplay demos\u201d, and then years in re-development, and more videos. It was ambitious, and then it was truncated. Then it was supposedly restored to a \u201ccomplete story\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

    A movie or TV show that was thrown together without a plan can be annoying, but I just discovered that it\u2019s a lot MORE annoying when placed into the protagonist\u2019s shoes (well, Scornguy\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019ve 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\u2019s visual design, coming to feel that \u201cScorn\u201d is a personal experience is a negative.<\/p>\n

    Okay, okay: not right away, and maybe, for other players, not at all. I get it; I\u2019ve had a subjective experience here, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m ranting about. Rant continues\u2026<\/p>\n

    Cinematics and Tone:<\/h1>\n

    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 \u201crun away and wait for them to wander off into a hole, awkwardly\u201d (way more awkwardly than in the promotional videos). I remember the developers saying \u201cthe creatures mostly just want to be left alone\u201d, 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

    Gameplay:<\/h1>\n

    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\u2019re directed to take him to will imply the best choice, the one that seems less likely to be lethal, is a trick. \u201cHAH, WE FOOLED YOU! Look how you butchered that poor, helpless, gimpy, big-eyed, innocent fucker.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Luckily I knew this was the game\u2019s one and only \u201cchoice\u201d, and that one machine was non-lethal (it\u2019s debatable whether the outcome is kinder). I worked out which of the two machines was most likely to be lethal only because I\u2019d 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\u2019m 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\u2019s actions. Everything else has to be done in order to progress, and it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s all there is in this world: ugliness).<\/p>\n

    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\u2026 well, without the claim of a mystical mad scientist on the island making crazy puzzles for the sake of puzzles\u2026 it makes no sense for them to be in this game, nor to do the things they do. This is\u2026 security by obscurity and irritation, I guess?<\/p>\n

    Evading lethal attacks and solving dumb puzzles greatly takes away from admiring the environment\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

    About that linear path: the gatekeeping is increasingly irritating and irrational. There are places where literal gates often weren\u2019t 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\u2019t wheelchair-bound can easily do in the real world\u2026 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\u2019s 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\u2019s even a \u201cpuzzle\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

    As is often the case, the answer to \u201cwhy\u201d is nothing more than \u201cbecause\u201d. 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s just an excuse: \u201cit\u2019s not that we left this out or suddenly changed our minds, we just meant this as a demonstrative set piece\u201d. 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\u2019t, or that could be because they sucked at setting expectations. Either way, the end result for the game\u2019s followers over the years is the same: we feel mislead. I don\u2019t think this was malignant. It just feels like failure and retconning.<\/p>\n

    Then there\u2019s the combat. I think I\u2019ll get back to that later (and everyone else has talked about it ad nausea), but here\u2019s a teaser: the combat also reads as failure and retcon.<\/p>\n

    Story Again:<\/h1>\n

    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\u2019ll keep going and learn what I can as I go along.<\/p>\n

    The second chapter made it difficult to really look around, and the environment\u2019s function became even more vague or outright arbitrary. That\u2019s 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 \u201cenvironmental storytelling\u201d 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\u2019s kinda my point.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

    \u201cOh, that\u2019s interesting,\u201d thought I. \u201cWhat 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?\u201d So many questions! The game\u2019s response?<\/p>\n

    \u201cWho cares? Shut up and walk way over there, because that\u2019s the only way to progress in this game.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The chapter seems to tell us that the accident at the end of the previous chapter caused the invasive organism infestation. Until it doesn\u2019t anymore. I can\u2019t tell if that\u2019s a retcon or bad design from the start. There\u2019s no clear progression from any source. Things we find later on imply that the parasite is an expected consequence of\u2026 something\u2026 And then the art book tells us that the source of these miserable flesh creatures is at the bottom of the \u201ccrater\u201d, and was specifically used by the beings that built all of this stuff.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s hanging out doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    Speaking of breeding: Not only is the lifecycle of each creature entirely unclear (the player theories I\u2019ve seen, combined with the art book, imply nature was replaced by design, but there are a LOT of liberties being taken here if that\u2019s the case), there\u2019s also no ecosystem present to suggest from where they all get their biomass and water. You could say they\u2019re 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\u2019t those supplies get replenished? If everything is organic, are these things not just growing more resources based on whatever feeds them?<\/p>\n

    There are two functional mold man pods in the factory, and the decay of everyone\u2019s bodies seems to be minimal, yet the factory seems to have been decaying for decades or more. There\u2019s also a mold man who seems to have JUST died when your second Scornguy arrives at the place where they\u2019re piled up everywhere. Why is that? What was he up to? Why did he die? Hell, how and why was he alive?<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s 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\u2019s apparently a total lack of writing anywhere in the environment.<\/p>\n

    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?<\/p>\n

    The more I played, the more questions I had. The \u201cstory\u201d falls apart at any examination, as happens when the people who build fictional worlds do so without actually deciding what the answers are. I\u2019m not saying a working story can\u2019t be crafted by building things in a nonlinear, haphazard, explorative fashion via impression\/suggestion. That\u2019s actually a method I\u2019ve been using now and then with my own attempts at writing. The difference is that I would never offer up a \u201cstory\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

    Chapter 3: The Third Belabored Bag of Nonsensical Tasks:<\/h1>\n

    When I got to Polis, my impression shifted from \u201c\u2026a once-great civilization that died out\u2026\u201d to a much less interesting impression: \u201cOh, 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\u2019re just really fucking stupid and awful, and awfully stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The text of the art book basically confirms that there\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Apparently this plan involves each elite member fighting infant-sized malignant mutant assholes in unconvincing \u201ccybernetic\u201d mech suits because\u2026 you have to extract their fluids in a pressing machine, and they\u2019re easier to stuff into the juicer when dead. Let\u2019s just accept this nonsense makes sense somehow (it fucking does not), the next question is: \u201cWhy 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?\u201d There\u2019s no clear diegetic explanation. It seems to be entirely because they needed a boss fight to make the game\u2019s kickstarter backers happy, and people have retconned that this fight is part of the ritual. Scornguy had to win his legitimacy.<\/p>\n

    Which does not align with anything else in this mess of \u201cenvironmental storytelling\u201d. 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\u2019 dumb little Master-Blaster Thunderdome room to fight these malignant little \u201cengineers\u201d (so the art book calls them, claiming that they\u2019re highly intelligent and intellectual, and yeah, that\u2019s 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\u2026 they maybe don\u2019t want to be pulped and used as some kind of blood donation to the host bodies in the other room).<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s all just<\/i>. so<\/i>. stupid<\/i>.<\/p>\n

    Taking it at face value\u2026 er\u2026 retconned, half-assed, need-the-book to semi-complete the vague impressionist painting\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201cno, actually, SCREW YOU, GUY\u201d at the last second, as if that\u2019s somehow deep and philosophical?<\/p>\n

    I mean, sure, if it didn\u2019t cost me all this effort to get there, maybe I could celebrate Scornguy\u2019s thwarting, and feel it was a justified outcome, once I understood what this was all about. But, no, that isn\u2019t inside the narrative, and is barely in the art book. There IS NO narrative. I went into this game with the spoiler of knowing \u201che doesn\u2019t have a happy ending, because he doesn\u2019t deserve one\u201d, and I STILL found the ending extremely<\/i> irritating.<\/p>\n

    You want to make a point of this civilization being a bunch of psychotic assholes?<\/p>\n

    Fine.<\/p>\n

    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?<\/p>\n

    Okay. Why not?<\/p>\n

    Why not\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

    But, whatever. Sure. Assholes made amazing stuff, and used it to do stupid horrible things. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    FINE.<\/p>\n

    Just do that on someone ELSE\u2019S 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\u2019ve 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\u2026 whatever that was. Ascension? A mere finish line?<\/p>\n

    I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    I don\u2019t like movies or shows like this either, but I can at least separate myself from the actions of these assholes when I\u2019m watching a plot play out in third-person that\u2019s 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\u2026 uh\u2026 I need to finish the game.<\/p>\n

    Visuals Do Not A Game Make:<\/h1>\n

    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\u2019re 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 Beksi\u0144ski, but it plays like it\u2019s 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\u2019s either a failure on the part of the developers, or they\u2019re being assholes to the player as well as to the creatures in the world they\u2019ve half-crafted.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s 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\u2019s one thing to imagine a civilization can get to THIS level of accomplished narcissism, but it\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

    Why do I want to toil in a world with zero nobility or redeeming qualities? There\u2019s no hint that there ever were any, aside from the civilization\u2019s 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\u2019re not a living organism with systems of nutrient delivery and immunity to decay?<\/p>\n

    \u201cIt\u2019s just a sci-fi\/horror game!\u201d you scream.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m not good with the \u201canything goes because sci-fi\u201d excuse. When you craft a world, it has to maintain willing suspension of disbelief, not continuously spit in its face.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019m not a prude who can\u2019t read art. I\u2019m 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\u2026 some\u2026 kind of \u2026 what point is there?<\/p>\n

    The art book\u2019s worst revelation is that this isn\u2019t an alien planet with human-like beings doing all this stupid shit. It\u2019s \u201cour world\u201d, taken to an extreme future stage of \u2026 what? Total alienness and depravity? Why make it humanity\u2019s eventual descendants? How is this artful commentary when it\u2019s this far abstracted from what any of us know as contemporary humans? It feels like pseudo-intellectualism:<\/p>\n

    \u201cWhy does it seem to make no sense and why is it so unforgivingly cruel?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

    \u201cWell,\u201d the pseudo-intellectual replies, \u201cit\u2019s deep. Trust me. If you can\u2019t understand it, you\u2019re probably just not thinking about it deeply enough. Also: EDGY!!\u201d<\/p>\n

    There is nothing of value to learn here, at least not through the perspective of one of the beings going through the ritual. It\u2019s not really a cautionary tale, because\u2026 I mean\u2026 this is all fantasy bullshit, shoehorned onto someone else\u2019s aesthetic. It\u2019s REALLY SUPER COOL to look at, in many places (as a Giger fan), but it\u2019s not a possible outcome for anyone alive today, and likely never (because the technology gets increasingly more implausible as it goes along, until there\u2019s literally a room that says \u201cdead bodies can be pieced together like Mary Shelley\u2019s 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\u2019t possibly be thrown together to do anything useful\u201d).<\/p>\n

    There\u2019s nobody in this game world to empathize with, except maybe the thousands of murdered humanoids these assholes supposedly used as raw materials.<\/p>\n

    [I\u2019m talking about what the developers refer to as \u201cmold men\u201d, because they supposedly come out of a mold. Because\u2026 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 \u201cused up\u201d (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\u2019s no hint of explanation for this, leaving me to guess that they weren\u2019t 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\u2019s not like the factory kept working on its own and then ground to a halt one day without supervision)]<\/p>\n

    Any lesson here?<\/p>\n

    “These were horrible people and they deserved to die out, and we assume it’s too bad EVERYTHING ELSE DIED WITH THEM”.<\/p>\n

    How fun.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    Oh yay. Who would not clamor to be a part of this tale from inside the flesh of a nihilistic selfish asshole?<\/p>\n

    Why did we want this?<\/p>\n

    Did we want this?<\/p>\n

    Did ANYONE want THIS?<\/p>\n

    There was probably never a chance of H.R. Giger and Beksi\u0144ski having their artwork inspire a noble and uplifting story about noble and ethical beings, but, as with \u201cAlien\u201d prequel \u201cPrometheus\u201d, 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\u2019t<\/i> 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 \u201cstory\u201d, 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\u2019re supposed to hate, because we keep being told humanity sucks.<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s possibly because we keep failing to regulate our mindless instincts. I mean, sure, that\u2019s definitely a thing. We live that reality, and few people will hold themselves accountable when they\u2019re actually in a position to do something. In \u201cScorn\u201d, 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\u2019t actually SEE any ascended beings. The art book tells us about them, there\u2019s possibly a wall carving of one in the Polis cathedral, but that\u2019s all. The book does not tell us why we don\u2019t see them in the game. Maybe they are all beyond the veil that Scornguy(s) failed to cross. Who fucking knows.<\/p>\n

    Oh, but things look all H.R. Giger-ish around here, so at least they had that going for them.<\/p>\n

    Maybe? Maybe there\u2019s more to it?<\/p>\n

    Who fucking knows. Probably not. The developers of this visual spectacle have suggested these things, but it\u2019s uncertain, they didn\u2019t 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 \u201cPrometheus\u201d, these interpretations are so contrived as to not be worth the effort to get to the semi-realizations in the first place.<\/p>\n

    Aftereffects:<\/h1>\n

    I did not HATE playing this game, for the most part. It\u2019s 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\u2019t. There was also a lot of \u201cFUCK YOU!\u201d at the game when Scornguy couldn\u2019t step over a slight fold in the floor, or step around a minor inconvenience of a \u201cgate\u201d, or squeeze through a generously sizeable opening, or move side to side, or forward or back, or \u2026 Especially when under attack from the belligerent Beksi\u0144ski farm animals wandering the second chapter.<\/p>\n

    I did NOT hate this game most of the time. I maybe don\u2019t 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, \u201cEvent Horizon\u201d, you fucking asshole of a film).<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s something more \u2026 meaningful and grand \u2026 about the amazing visual styles that were, if you\u2019re 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 \u201cAlien\u201d (instead, we got a world built by the retconned cultist assholes of the \u201cAlien\u201d prequel \u201cPrometheus\u201d).<\/p>\n

    I am glad to have bought “Scorn” while it was on sale. I am glad to have read the art book. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve gotten, in terms of Giger-inspired games over the years. Impressed because the game really does look amazing (if you like the artists they\u2019ve cribbed). Pissed off because the end product is embarrassingly shallow. \u201cDark Seed\u201d had a simplistic story, but I didn\u2019t 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\u2019 STUPID STUPID civilization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There are spoilers all over in here. I can\u2019t be bothered to write about this without spoiling shit. I also can\u2019t 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\u2019s voice in my head… <\/p>\n

    Read More<\/i><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,11,6,4,13,12],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-complaint","tag-game","tag-humanity","tag-opinion","tag-rant","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dysamoria.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}