💥 TRENDING: Id/Hyde - Collection

Profound, but not for everyone.
As other people have pointed out, this is in many respects a walking simulator, but it's a damn good one. Ebb Software have exceeded all expectations in the world and art design of Scorn, and you can spend hours upon hours just looking at it. It's a truly incredible thing to behold. In terms of game completion however, it is very short. If you don't do ANY sightseeing, the game time runs anywhere from 3-4 hours, depending on how good you are at puzzles/how often you die, if at all/whether you looked up a walkthrough or not.
In between admiring Ebb Software's beautiful art there are puzzles to solve, very reminiscent of the kind present in Frictional Game's 'Amnesia: The Dark Descent'. None of them feel shoehorned in, they feel like natural extensions of the world itself and an intrinsic obstacle one would expect to need to overcome in the setting. They aren't exceptionally difficult, although I spent more time on some than others.
Combat is present, but is best avoided except when absolutely necessary. The starting weapon, some sort of mechanical piston, is quite bad and while it has infinite ammo, it can only fire twice before it needs to recharge and can only hit things in melee range. Only one enemy in the game can be killed with 2 shots, so it is unsafe to use against tougher enemies. Later on you find a pistol-esque weapon that holds 6 rounds, 4 more shots than the piston, but it is not particularly accurate and is very slow to reload. The reload animation cannot be interrupted or canceled either, so if you expend your 'clip' before you kill everything, your best bet is to just run instead of attempt reloading. About 70% of the way through the game you get a shotgun with very limited ammo, but is good for killing a handful of strong enemies they throw at you almost immediately upon finding it. At the very end you find a grenade launcher, but by then it only serves as a puzzle tool, not a real weapon. Addtionally, ammo is a scarce, finite resource, so you must pick your battles wisely or else not have ammunition for some of the tougher encounters. Movement has also not been tuned well for combat. You can't strafe while sprinting, which forces you to turn away from an enemy if you want to dodge an incoming attack. There is also no jump button, so you can't hop over obstacles or potentially leap over a low attack. All in all, the only purpose the combat seems to serve is to provide a source of suspense.
There is no dialogue. All narrative elements of the game occur through the actions of the player and piecing together various elements of the world on your own to explain what happened and what's going on. The combination of player driven action and environmental storytelling do an exceedingly good job of painting a picture of the events that transpired and what your character's goals are without spelling everything out for you.
Finally, the art itself. It's alien, cryptique, grotestque and at times erotic. It catches your attention and will hold it for as long as you let it. Around 50% of my playthrough was spent just taking it all in. Whatever flaws Ebb Software may have as developers and by extension their games, they make up for in their ability to choose a vision and bring it to life with unwavering skill and dedication. Nothing in this game looks qualitatively bad, and there are many places where Ebb Software could have cut corners that unobservant players would never have noticed. But they didn't, not as far as I was able to tell. Their work is impeccable, and for that reason alone I give this game a thumbs up, and I eagerly await news of their next project.

PS: Get a community manager from the get-go next time ;)