Scorn News

Scorn review: a staggeringly impressive horror world with messy combat

Scorn is a deliberately grim game with a lot of body horror. Best avoid it and this review if you have issues with body horror themes.

I was talking to a friend about Scorn and they asked, "Is there a story?". And yeah, Scorn has a story. At some point there'll be a two hour YouTube video outlining how it has a clear and nuanced plot, or that it's a metaphor for periods and erections, or both. In the immediate, it's about slithering out of a pod, staggering through the desert, and finding yourself in a strange, huge rotting machine made of rock and flesh that's already decades into abandonment and decay, and where most things look a bit penisy or womby. It's about the lizardy parasite latched to your back gradually transforming your body. It's about grim squishy noises and survival.

Scorn doesn't have dialogue, or a map. It doesn't really have a HUD, it doesn't have quest markers, and your character will not, upon seeing a strange new device, say something like "Hmm... seems like a key. Maybe if I find the two missing ones, it'll open up a way forward!" out loud. It won't even pull focus to the corridor you should check next. You just have to look around, experiment, and figure it out. I think I like it. I don't know if I can recommend it.

Scorn is one of those games that makes my career as a writer rather difficult. I’m expected to be quick with a quip and verbally insightful – and often have something to say about everything and anything – but Scorn continually left me lost for words. That is, except for the continuous swearing I did whenever I found myself stumped by a puzzle or particularly aggressive enemy. Which was often.

This first-person horror game, which is heavily inspired by the artwork of H. R. Giger (of Alien fame) and Zdzisław Beksiński, does a wonderful job of immersing and disorienting you in its desolate, biomechanical world. You – some sort of humanoid – wake up in this unfamiliar place, with no idea as to who or where you are, or what your purpose is. Immediately, however, it becomes clear that you probably want to get some answers and escape this place, and that’s what you set off to try and do.

The alien world you then proceed to explore is so intricately detailed that you’ll find yourself spending time just taking it all in; this facility is a mess of flesh, bones, and rotting mass that you must get to know. And I mean that literally. The environment is not just pretty to look at. It boasts bizarre alien technology in the form of puzzles, all of which connect to each other in one way or another.

In 2021, a wayward pilgrim named "bogleech" expressing themselves in the crumbling remains of Tumblr insightfully compared cosmic horror to the notion of an ant exploring a circuit board. From the ant's perspective, this is some kind of terrifying alien city, and if an ant were able to grasp, even for a moment, a sliver of a human computer's terrible purpose and context, how could it ever go back to being an ant?..
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Scorn will release itself from the bone wall a week earlier than planned

Long in-development first-person horror Scorn was due to finally release on October 21st, but in a season of delays its made the most twisted choice imaginable. It's now set to release a week earlier on October 14th.

The Pulse Monthly - 9.0

Hey everyone,

It’s been another exciting month for the team here at Ebb Software and the Scorn community at large! On the 21st of September we officially shared Scorn’s prologue with backers and press. The team has really enjoyed seeing all the playthroughs, comments, theories, and feedback shared from the community.

On September 22nd, we ran an AMA on Reddit, providing the community a chance to get answers to the questions they’ve been dying to ask. If you still have some questions, be sure to leave a comment here or reach out via our social channels and we’ll do our best to answer them.

In case you haven’t been keeping a close eye on our social posts, we also had another exciting announcement today.

You’ve waited long enough

From fine-tuning animations to wrapping up bug fixes and optimisations, the team has been extremely focused on finalising the game before launch.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So focused, in fact, that we’re going to be releasing Scorn on the 14th of October - an entire week early!

Additional Community FAQ

A number of questions have been raised since we released the prologue last week, so we wanted to address those here as well!

Will there be settings to disable motion blur, chromatic aberration, or any other settings?

Thank you for all the feedback around this. We’ve seen a number of requests come in around having an easy way to disable motion blur, and will be implementing this into the final version of the game for launch.

As a temporary workaround to disable motion blur for those of you with access to the prologue, navigate to:

C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Local\Scorn\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor

Open Engine.ini with a text editor, such as Notepad, and add the following:

[SystemSettings]
r.MotionBlur.Max=0
r.MotionBlurQuality=0
r.DefaultFeature.MotionBlur=0

Will the game have any achievements?

Yes! There will be achievements to complete, and for those of you who like to be thorough, you’ll need to play through multiple times in order to 100% the game. As for what they are, you’ll have to wait and see.

Will Scorn work with Steam Deck?

While we have not designed Scorn to work with the Steam Deck or checked for compatibility, we have seen some users successfully run our game on it.

Development Update

The team has officially wrapped up production and continues to work through resolving a few outstanding bugs before launch. It’s hard to believe that in just a couple of weeks, Scorn will be unleashed upon the world for all to experience. As this will be our last official Pulse update before launch, we wanted to leave you with some thoughts on our journey so far directly from Ebb Software’s CEO and Scorn’s Creative Director, Ljubomir Peklar.

We’re really excited to have almost wrapped up our development of the game and now, with just a few weeks to go, the development team are busy adding final polish to get the game ready for launch. With the launch of the game finally upon us, all of us at Ebb Software team want to thank each and every one of you. We can’t wait for you to plunge into the grotesque experience of Scorn on 14 October.

As always, thank you for all your support, excitement, and encouragement over the years as we worked to bring our vision for Scorn to life. Be sure to follow our Facebook or Twitter for more content as we ramp up for launch and we’ll see you in October for our next update!