October Approaches

First announced in November 2014, Scorn is game that (assuming it isn't delayed any more) will have spent just under eight years in development.  That's quite a long time.  However, only a cursorily glance at the visuals will relevel that it is a game with a very distinctive look.  Every room, item, object and creature has an extremely detailed bio-mechanical look to it.  I imagine this must have been very labor intensive work to render in a three-dimensional environment.   Needless to say the dev team are undoubtable fans H.R. Giger's artwork, as well as Zdzislaw Beksinski's...possibly even Wayne Barlowe's.  The sound design is quite impressive too.  There are all the grinding, squishing, creaking and cracking noises you would expect to hear in such a techno-organic landscape.  On top of that the game has eerie ambient sounds that echo in the background.  Combining that with the moody lighting and ever-present haze, results in something that manages to be both weirdly surreal and yet disturbingly tangible.  Enough about visuals and sound though, how is the game actually played?

Well...all the information that I have comes from the relatively short preview build of the game, so I can comment too much on actual gameplay.  As far as I can gather though the game was originally intended to be a FPS, but that aspect of Scorn has since been lessened in prominence in order to make room for puzzles and exploration.  Personally, I think this was probably a wise decision.  Currently, it appears that the moment-to-moment gameplay has a lot in common with tiles such as SOMA and Amnesia: Rebirth.  The key difference between those games and Scorn being the player has some fighting capability rather than always opting to run and hide.  This mix of different kinds of gameplay should help break up repetition.  Even so, I think Scorn is going to need a bit more to really shine.

What am I talking about here?  Well, in a word - story.  I don't think the game will benefit from dialogue sequences, unless they were done in some strange sounding alien language with subtitles.  That might fit well with the overall tone.  Regardless, it's clear that the developers know that they can say a lot with visuals alone.  Take, for example, the half-hatched humanoid that players come across in the preview build.  Through superb animation and sound it's made plain that this creature doesn't know what is going on or what to do...assuming the player doesn't accidentally (or on purpose) kill it.  Little details like that make for good pieces of story that can then be woven together with other bits to form a somewhat cohesive tale.  The only potential pitfall I can see with this approach is an insufficient number of those story pieces.  In order to generate enough of them Scorn is going to need some meat on it's bones (pun intended).  Here's hoping the devs have enough interesting ideas packed into their game to make it a solid adventure.