 Well, we finally made it through one of the very worst years in gaming ever. There were a couple of big games that were good to great, a few big games that were terrible, and a lot of games that were neither good enough nor bad enough to even be able to write about. I've made less videos this year than I ever have, and as a result, for the first time ever I've had a couple of months where I've been losing subscribers. Which makes it even harder to push myself to make more videos, to be honest. But yesterday I played a game that I have been really looking forward to for a long while, and it gave me the fire to write about a game that I haven't felt since Elden Ring. Let's have a brief chat about Scorn. The entire core of this game is the way it looks and its environments and themes. So there's no possible way to do this without spoilers. But if you're just interested in hearing about a game that I have a feeling will be divisive, well then you're in the right place. Because parts of Scorn are absolutely stunning, and other parts of Scorn are some of the most frustrating stuff ever. So whether you think Scorn is a masterpiece or a pile of garbage is going to be highly dependent on your patience and tolerance for walking back and forth in amazing environments hoping to stumble upon the correct interactive object. Anyone who's watched a few of my videos will surely know that patience is not my strong suit. Scorn went through a long, long development cycle. The game was announced in 2014 when the Serbian Studio EBS software launched a failed Kickstarter. They eventually got enough private funding to start actual development in 2015 and a successful $150,000 Kickstarter in 2017 was when the game began getting developed in earnest. From there it took another full five years and according to the devs in that time as much as 90% of the game had to be scrapped and reworked. We can't know for sure what the game was originally intended to be, but one thing has remained constant. From the earliest communications about the game it was clear that art design, world design and the influence of artists like Geiger and Beksinski would be core to the design. Now art design is a sound basis to develop a game around. These are artists whose work builds a world. And I might even say that no piece of media I've ever seen as effectively channels the core of these artworks as Scorn does. However, a game is not a painting. The last five or six years has seen quite a lot of discussion around games as an art form. Some argue that games are most importantly toys first and art second. I sympathize with this view and personally my favorite games are always ones that are mechanically interesting, but I'm not one of these people who sneers as game is an art form. I may be a working class hero with these hands here, but I'm also a refined art snob who requires at least some artistic merit in their games. And I have found that there are quite a few excellent walking simulator slash interactive art games that truly do push games to their limits as a means of artistic expression. I cite them all the time, but games like the Stanley parable, Tacoma, Oxenfree, Edith Finch, Journey, Firewatch, Grime, and others push right up against the limit of how little mechanical interactivity is needed to still be called a game. Those titles might not have fail states, but they are all stories or worlds that could not be told in any other way. In many ways, Scorn is like these games. The most important things in Firewatch aren't what you're doing with the keyboard, but why and where you are doing them. And the most important things about Scorn are not how you're interacting with the game, but the world and art around you as you interact. A few months ago, Scorn released a teaser that literally wrote across the screen, Scorn is not a shooter, which led me to believe that Scorn would be firmly within the walking simulator or puzzle game genres. But that's not actually true. Scorn is indeed a shooter. It's also a walking simulator, and it's also a puzzle game. The question is whether it does any of those things particularly well. But first, I want to talk about what Scorn unquestionably does well. And that is build a world and commit to a theme. What games do well? When I was just a wee lad of 18, I wrote a bit of poetry. Poems are the medium best suited to make pictures out of words. All art forms share things between them, but they also all have something they do better than any other medium. Games as an art form is the only way to actually inhabit a world. Geiger's paintings bring to mind a different world. They hint at a convergence of technology in the body with a heavy emphasis on themes of penetration and sexual reproduction and violence. The first Alien film, which he helped create, has heavy themes of violation. And his other artwork is even more disturbing than the film. What's implied and hinted at in Alien is made pretty explicit in some of his paintings and sculptures. Scorn sets out to do what games do better than anything else, by not just addressing those themes by showing them to you, but by putting you in a world, surrounding you with that art, and having you walk around and interact with it. Scorn is probably the most unnerving and memorable game world I have ever seen. The artwork is obviously highly reminiscent of other artists, but it's not just ripping stuff off. It's more than an homage. Everything works to set you in the world. The first weapon you find is a phallic piston gun. When you heal, you use bubbles filled up on a gross little animal. Bullets are shaped like teeth that you pull from these weird little flowers that look like ovaries or mouths or kind of both. Opening doors has you putting your hands in fleshy orifices and operating other terminals has you penetrate them with a spike on your hand. The game's very best moments are almost all art design. Coming out into stunning vistas after emerging from cramped rotting interiors or the second to last level that has you killing a huge monster by tearing it apart from the inside as it seems to plead with you to stop. The final level is just amazing. I spent a long time just standing and looking and all that stuff is enhanced by some of the very best sound design you will ever hear in a video game. Almost every sound is perfect. It's so good. I'm going to actually play some of that here. The sounds you're about to hear now are constant and are as much a part of the world and art of Scorn as the textures and levels are. Check this stuff out, man. It's so top notch. OK, so art, sound, world building, these are the things that Scorn does well enough to be called a masterpiece. So now let's talk about the other stuff that Scorn does. The stuff that's like, you know, not a masterpiece. Gameplay. So when I watched that teaser that made a point of saying that Scorn isn't a shooter, I have to admit I assumed the game would be a puzzle game. The devs actually solved this kind of confusion by explaining what the game was when they said it was, quote, an immersive atmospheric horror experience. Well, that explains it then. So I guess if I go to Steam and the genre section and type in immersive atmospheric horror experience, oh, no, that's not a genre of game developers. Seriously, though, when I heard that, I thought, OK, it's a walking sim. Cool, because walking sims are great as long as the walk is interesting. And this art design here would make for an interesting walk. But when I got my hands on Scorn, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Scorn really isn't a walking sim and it's not a puzzle game. It's a game that feels like it simply never figured out what it wanted to be. Scorn could have been an amazing shooter or an amazing puzzler or an amazing walking sim. But instead, it's a little bit of all of those things and it doesn't do any of them perfectly well. Whenever something pisses me off about a game, I'm one of those people who instantly goes to Reddit to bitch with other people who are also pissed off. And the consensus I've seen from people on Reddit, both those who love the game and those who do not love the game is that Scorn is a puzzle game. In my opinion, though, this is false. Scorn has a few puzzles, but most of what's being described as puzzles are not, in fact, puzzles. A puzzle in a game is something that requires you to use logic or make mental connections. It means getting stuck in thinking something through the best puzzle games like Portal or Factorio, take a basic puzzle and then explore it all the way through the game. A good puzzle game is one where if you were dropped into the last puzzle first, you would be totally fucked because it would be impossible to figure out. But when you start from the beginning, you get to that last puzzle and you're able to figure it out seamlessly. A puzzle must give the player an aha moment. That's what puzzle games do. It's what crossword puzzles do. Aha is the core design of a puzzle game. Scorn at no point, literally not one point has you saying aha. Scorn does kind of begin with a puzzle and it is the lowest form of puzzle. The sliding tiles minigame is the prebiotic ooze of video game puzzles. Now, you're manipulating gross eggs that will turn into an abomination that may or may not be the character you eventually play as. But this is still just a sliding tile puzzle. That's fine, man. In fact, it led me to believe, ah, OK, so this is going to be a puzzle game. And it just starts out with a simple puzzle. But no, this is one of two or three proper puzzles you will do. The next puzzle is a lockpicking minigame that isn't actually a puzzle at all. And then there's the classic spinning rings puzzle style. And then there's a ball and a maze puzzle. And that's all there is. They are a small assortment of the most common and cheap video game puzzles. Now, listen, man, making a good puzzle game is hard. Puzzle games are the most dangerous of video games because the line between portal and infuriating bullshit is razor thin. So it's fine that there are a few cliche puzzle types in Scorn. I don't mind that. What I do mind is people calling what you spend the vast majority of your time doing in Scorn puzzles. Scorn is broken up into two main elements of gameplay. Puzzles are a tiny, meaningless fraction of what you'll do. Most of your time playing will be spent engaging with enemies through combat or running away and walking around to find an interactable object. Let's start with the latter because it's basically the core design of the game. Walking around and clicking on an interactable object is the central design of the walking simulator genre. In the Stanley parable, the entire game is walking and interacting with things. Edith Finch and Tacoma is almost entirely, well, it is entirely walking and clicking on things. These games are as much about exploration while you're walking as the interactions themselves. The interactions are really just a way to press a button to end a section. Walking around and clicking on stuff in the correct order is not a puzzle. Edith Finch is not a puzzle game. Randomly stumbling onto the correct object doesn't require you to use logic. It doesn't require making mental connections or a plan, and it never makes you say, ah, the same with Firewatch or Tacoma, any of the other absolutely spectacular walking sim titles. The reason this still remains engaging is because of what you're walking through, not what you're walking to. The genre works because the world, writing and art combine to make everything feel fresh and novel. You don't retread grounds in these games. There's very little backtracking in the games that do have backtracking, like Oxenfree, for instance, use this time to give you dialogue and narrative. You're never retreading the same ground because you need to recheck a hallway to make sure you didn't miss a button to press. Have you ever wondered why nobody has made a walking simulator with combat? I mean, seriously, walking simulators are somewhat popular, but a large chunk of players do not play them because they like combat in their games. So it seems like a no-brainer to make a walking sim with light combat to keep stuff interesting. And this is exactly what Scorn has done. And one of the most interesting aspects of the game is that it proves why the best walking sims have not done this. It proves why the best walking sims do not have fail states. Scorn is at its very, very best as you are first walking through an area experiencing it. The game's core is the novelty of the exploration. Remember, blindly stumbling around until you find a button is not a puzzle. It's just a one-button QTE to start the next section of the game. So Scorn works when you're moving through its world, experiencing it for the first time. But it badly falls apart when you are forced to walk through the same section for the second time or the third or the fifth. And this is where the design of Scorn kind of falls apart a little. The art, world, exploration, interaction and light puzzles all work amazingly because the novelty of the setting is stunning and amazing. But when that core of the design interacts with its combat and checkpoint system, it creates a serious problem. There's no snipers needed, Finch. Scorn probably could have been an amazing setting for a shooter, but it's likely they realize that shooters are only fun when the player is powerful and Scorn is a narrative and world-building experience. Works only if the player is delicate and afraid. Scorn could have been an amazing puzzle game, but puzzle games should only be made by people who fucking love puzzle games and are interested in creating fresh new puzzles. Amateurs need not apply. Scorn could have been an amazing walking sim and it is much of the time. But in order to have the horror actually work here, there needed to be some sense of danger and foreboding to the player. You see, I understand the challenges Scorn had to overcome and I am sympathetic. The reason this game took so long and needed an almost entire reboot is almost certainly because the devs needed to grapple with those questions. But the solutions they arrived at while making sense don't work sometimes. So let's talk about the combat. The actual combat in Scorn is purposefully clunky and slow and difficult. And I'm not sure it needed to be like that. The game clearly takes inspiration from survival horror games like Resident Evil. Reloading your gun in combat is barely an option and is almost certain death. Healing in combat is impossible. This would be fine if the enemies were like Resident Evil enemies and you could easily run away and disengage. But unfortunately the enemies in Scorn are snipers. I don't know why it just that simple thing of not having ranged enemies would have helped so much. The vast majority of enemies will spit at you from across the room and then cover your screen with shit so you can't see. Getting hit by melee will knock you down and make you wait through a long ass animation to get back up. Oh, and then get hit again by a fucking acid spitter locking you into kind of like stun lock shit. In order to shoot, you must not only stand still, but stand still and wait for like three full seconds as your reticle slowly shrinks until you're ready to shoot. Scorn isn't like super hard or anything. It's not Doom Eternal on Nightmare, but it's hard enough that you might die a few times. And if you do die, you'll be confronted with the worst part of Scorn's design. It's checkpoint system. Scorn does not have manual saving. Why? I have no idea. I honestly have no idea. I can't think of a reason for it to not have manual saving. Why? Instead, it has checkpoints, checkpoints that you can't see and that seem very oddly placed. Now, as boring as they seem, checkpoints are an insanely important part of a game's design. And again, like Doom Eternal or Neo, I want to have to refight every enemy when I die because the combat encounters are the core of the game and I don't want to be cheated out of it. I want to have to beat the whole encounter as it was designed without dying. BioShock is an amazing game with great combat, but it's deeply hurt by its terrible respawn system. You can just die over and over and enemies don't respawn or regain health. This eliminates all challenge from the game as you can just brute force your way through every encounter. It makes it significantly less fun. No one checkpoint system is right. The key is choosing the right checkpoint system for your game. And Scorn has chosen the worst possible checkpoint and save system for their game. Checkpoints and Scorn are save states that save everything. If you hit a checkpoint with one health and then die, you will respawn with one health. I found myself in a loop of deaths from this very issue near the beginning of the game. It turns out I actually could have healed, but I only discovered that the game had healing after this when I was reading about the game. The only way you know that you can heal is because there's a button for it in the key bindings. Anyway, I had one hit worth of health and was repeatedly killed by the same enemy until it became clear that I was now in a soft lock and had to restart the chapter because there's no manual saves. You'll have checkpoints that require you to solve a puzzle multiple times or open a door multiple times. All of this would be fine on its own, man. The combat is, you know, right in line with the combat in most survival horror games. But the reason this combat design works in Resident Evil Village but not in Scorn is because Scorn is a walking simulator at heart. That's what it does best. That's the core of its design. A walking simulator only works if the walk is interesting. And that means it only works the first time you take that walk. There are no snipers in Firewatch because having to listen to a conversation that was emotionally powerful a second or third time would be terrible. Having failstates in Resident Evil works because the combat and danger is the core of the design. It's not the world or the story. It's the gameplay and the resource management. But Scorn is a walking simulator mixed with a survival horror shooter and those two things great against each other in the worst possible way imaginable. The first time you jam your hands into a fleshy console to open a vagina door, it's amazing. The third time you're forced to do that, it is annoying as hell. Getting caught in the death loop in Resident Evil is awesome because having to reload a save and try something different is the core of the game. The combat is the puzzle in Resident Evil. That same situation in Scorn is awful because the core of the game isn't the combat, which is one of its weakest systems. The core of the game is the exploration. And again, exploring a place is only interesting the first time. After that, it's a chore of switches you need to throw again to get back to where you were. The other big problem with Scorn's design is what we touched on briefly earlier. Wandering around until you find a terminal is not a puzzle. It is light exploration. As such, it only works the first time. When a level is maze-like or unintuitive, it does work to make the experience disorienting and unsettling. But this is a fine line, man. If it's too maze-like or too unintuitive, you run the risk of the player having to go back and forth through the same rooms over and over, looking for the right order to press buttons in, which runs right back into the same problem. Moving through the levels is amazing once. It's still good twice. If you need to run back and forth through a hallway five times, it becomes extremely fucking annoying. In the second and last level, I had to eat dinner and got up and paused the game. I didn't turn it off because it's the fucking checkpoint because there's no manual saves. But anyway, I just left it paused. When I came back, I didn't recall which way I had been facing. So I ended up having to run rings around the entire damn maze-like level over and over and over until I finally noticed a door in one of the hallways that had the final switch I had to throw. It was awful. It took what had been a really powerful area and turned it into 30 minutes of an infuriating slog of walking back and forth. Man, it soured the game for me, I'm telling you. I almost quit. And that kind of thing would be fine once or twice, but that's a big part of this game. So much of the level design is maze-like and much of the gameplay is wandering that maze, looking for a panel you saw earlier that you probably need to use now. That's not a puzzle, man. It's just getting lost, wrapping up. Scorin's final level is a perfect summation of the game's triumphs and its failures. The level's art design is absolutely amazing and it reinforces the game's heavy themes surrounding life and death, birth and violence, sex and parasitic infection. The central interactive objects of the level are grotesque fetuses that need to be put into a crusher and turned into blood juice that you then inject into pregnant things. This final section and ending is one of the most memorable and thought-provoking sequences I have ever experienced in a game. It is a triumph and then there's a multi-stage boss fight. And this boss fight is to video game boss fights as the sliding tile puzzle is to portal. You run around until the boss exposes his glowing weak spots. You do that three times and then you get a cutscene. Then you do it again, except this time nothing happens, no glowing weak spot. So I ran around and I waited. Nothing. I shot its head. Nothing. I shot it when he reloaded the gun. Nothing. And then I googled it. Turns out you need to let it try and melee you and then shoot him in the glowing weak spot. Unfortunately, the glowing weak spot doesn't open up every time he melees you. I've actually had that happen to me and figured the lesson was, well, don't let it get close to melee you. So what you've got here is the classic hit the weak spot three times boss fight. You know, the one straight out of 2007, but they couldn't even do that particularly well. It's to hit the weak spot three times boss fight, except I had to Google it to figure out why I couldn't see the weak spot in the second phase. And then there's a third phase of running around until the weak spot appears. This level perfectly demonstrates the problem with Scorn. The level is so perfect, it would have stood as one of the best walking simulator levels ever. But then Scorn thought it needed an FPS boss fight. When it comes to game design and not walking simulator design, Scorn has very few ideas and those ideas are from 2007. Hit the weak spot three times. Really? Why? A second hit the weak spot three times. Why? Scorn actually didn't need any gameplay at all. But if it was going to have combat in puzzles, it needed to do a better job with it. If it was going to have this combat, it had to have a teetaling and checkpoint system be well thought out and then it would have worked. But as it stands, Scorn is an impressive work of visual and audio art, awkwardly mated to a pretty bad video game. Should you play it? Absolutely. I don't regret playing it at all. The problem is I can think of any number of ways that this could have ended up being one of the best games I've ever played. Instead of being one of the worst games I ever played, married to one of the best games I've ever heard and seen. All right, we finally have a shitload of games coming out now. So I will be back more often in the next few months. I will also do something about Call of Duty, because I know all my people who watch my videos love Call of Duty. All of you constantly like to say in the comments how terrible Call of Duty is. I get it. It is terrible, but it's also awesome. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.