Scornand I did not get on very well, as Robert mentioned inhis review. To say the game ran less than ideally would be an understatement, but in the time since, the game has been patched to address the glitches and bugs. What’s less likely to be fixed though is Scorn’s idea of an opening sequence, and how it misses the mark of what makes a great wordless intro.
You see, Scorn’s whole story is told entirely via diegetic world-building that the player observers, and the same goes for Scorn’s gameplay mechanics. Other than a handful of on-screen prompts for interactive items, everything is meant to be intuited by the player. Nobody holds your hand, and it’s entirely on you to make sense of the world and its mechanics. It’s a refreshing thing that more games could stand to explore, but Scorn’s first act is probably the worst example of it.
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A typical puzzle game would introduce you to its core gameplay loop, or if it lacks a traditional loop, then layer each set piece puzzle over time. Scorn doesn’t do that. Scorn gives you a brief tutorial on how to manipulate a multipart mechanism, and then drops you into a puzzle well over four rooms large, including redundant rooms and puzzle elements out of order.
That right there is the first major hiccup. Introducing mechanics out of order is rarely, if ever, a good idea.Alone in the Dark(2008) had enemies who could cloud your vision, so they had the ‘brilliant’ idea to teach you how to blink and clear your vision before even covering basic movement. It became an infamous gaffe, lambasted for how absurd it feels out of the greater context afforded to the player.
Scorn makes the exact same mistake, as one of the most obvious machines to work with is also one of the last pieces you’ll need to solve the opening puzzle. I spent a good thirty minutes just trying things in every single room, presuming thatsurelyScorn wouldn’t start itself off with so much going on that you can get lost before you’re even immersed.
Except that’s exactly what it does - the actual starting point for the puzzle is one of the very last rooms you can reach, wherein you find a slide puzzle. Why something so artificial and out of left field as a slide puzzle? I couldn’t begin to tell you. It doesn’t feed into the wonder of awakening in an eldritch hatchery, but instead forcefully remind you that you’re playing a videogame. The mechanics raise more questions than answers.
It sounds like I’m making a lot out of just one step in the puzzle, but the way Scorn frames arriving at this point is as this big reveal of how to begin, only for it to be something so simple and pedestrian that it makes the artificial aspects all the more apparent. You realize that this is all a very elaborate series of smoke-and-mirrors adventure game puzzles trying to seem otherworldly.
The illusion of what you’re supposedly doing is what’s most important about any game, especially one so reliant on atmosphere as Scorn. By shattering that suspension of disbelief, Scorn loses som of its intrigue. There is no Wizard of Oz, Rosebud is just a sled, and the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes at all. For a game so reliant on sweeping me away with its presentation, to halt all my progress forward, demanding I beat my head against a wall until arriving at a style of gameplay that is so artificial… I just can’t point to a benefit to this design decision. In its defence, the later puzzles aren’t quite this obtuse.
Much has been said regarding Scorn’s marketing, where it was sold as more of a survival-horror shooter. While not beneficial, even if it were more action-focused, I could understand a slow-burn opening - if it had a point. Yet Scorn’s introduction doesn’t really tell us anything other than that its hatchery is gory and brutal. That this world is cold and uncaring. All of this is obvious from the menu screen - Scorn is a lot of things, but emotionally subtle isn’t one of them.
RELATED:Scorn: Story And Ending, ExplainedAll of this could’ve been avoided had Scorn not frontloaded itself so obtusely. A great puzzle game eases you in, with each new experience teaching you something meaningful. Even notoriously complex titles likeMysttend to interweave their various ideas together, to the point of regional linguistics in a school house and local wildlife in Riven later being important to puzzle solutions.
Likewise,Portal, closer in scope to Scorn, originally worked without any narration as well during its beta. GLaDoS as an antagonist was a late-development inclusion to add flavor and motivation. Most test chambers functioned exactly as they do in the final release, left up to intuition on the player’s part, expecting you to observe and learn. Yet you weren’t expected to figure out how to manipulate plasma balls and long jumps out of the gate in order to access the first Portal gun prototype. You walked through a portal, then put a cube on a button.
Now the argument could be made that this is all in service to Scorn feeling alien, hostile, and unforgiving. It’s a valid angle, except for one problem I mentioned earlier: if immersion in the genuinely gorgeous (if equally grotesque) world design is the goal, then ripping the player out of that space with an artificial puzzle clearly drawn from our reality isn’t the way to go. Seducing the mind into suspending its disbelief isn’t simply done by beating it over the head one minute and thrusting something familiar in the next. You coax it out slowly, over time, until it stops questioning it entirely. Which certainly takes longer than the first half hour of a game to accomplish.
It’s not that there isn’t anything redeeming to Scorn, nor that you shouldn’t play it, but its opening does it absolutely no favors. Hopefully Ebb Software learns from this, and their next product doesn’t take another eight years to learn from Scorn’s struggles.
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