What’s more impressive is that the world seemingly communicates to you, the player, in how it reacts to your presence. It speaks just to how striking the world is, which helps if and when you get lost in your first playthrough. The level design is so good that I could attempt to pass off screenshots as art. Even shotgun ammo looks upsettingly like testicles. You don’t gaze into lenses to change camera views, either, and in some cases, you look through a membrane reflecting the area you need to see. The game stays aggressively true to the biomechanical concepts, with consoles as simple as elevator panels being distinctive yet clever, resembling muscles and tendons that you pull like a lever. The weapons and enemies are lively, but not to any extremes, to the point of distinctive gun reload animations featuring convulsing flesh. The animations were particularly striking in this game. More than anything else, the game is loaded with commentary, and geared toward immersion, featuring powerful audio/visual storytelling. Given the Body Horror genre’s pedigree as some of the most gruesome images put to any medium, it’s familiar ground, but don’t go in expecting it to be fodder for streamers to feign terror. In terms of horror genres, the game sits nicely in a blend of Biopunk and Body Horror, with less focus on jump scares and thrills, and more on surrealism, disquieting notions, and disturbing violence. There is no dialogue, with the intent for you as the player (an unnamed protagonist) to understand the world around you and discern the message of the game’s story. The choices you make in Scorn revolve around ammunition and health in relation to combat situations - the more you avoid them, the more supplies you preserve. Early on, you are presented with a significant choice to make, and the results are jarringly opposite to how they seem, but ultimately don’t affect the ending - there is only one end. Scorn is linear and concise, but is entirely unguided, with minimal UI elements to allow for as much immersion as possible.
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