izigame.me

I'm giving this a recommended but with a grain of salt.
The story and world of scorn are subtly disturbing and morbidly fascinating. The uncomfortable and macabre atmosphere it creates is truly unlike anything else i have played before.
(story spoilers)
The story tells of a fallen civilization who was able to create great cities and monuments using biotech. At some point long ago, this biotech became infected with a horrible virus, causing the civilization to fall and its citizens to die and become part of the massive flesh conglomerate that has taken over the buildings. The survivors made a trek through the desert in search of a portal to salvation. Many died along this path, and this can be seen by the countless amount of bodies along the way. Those who made it underwent a surgical ritual and transferred their consciousness to a hivemind, being reborn free from the infection. At the end, we see this hivemind and portal, after a grueling journey across the vast desert and complex city ruins. After all of the suffering that the player character endures, we make it only steps from the portal before falling to a parasite that has been with us since the beginning. This virus transforms us into an awful mound of flesh anchored to the ground, forever damned to stare into the portal to salvation mere feet away. This ending heavily reminded me of the ending of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
The story was masterfully crafted and told through environmental storytelling only, so it will take some thinking to figure it out for yourself. I found the story disturbing and repulsive, for obvious reasons, but more than anything i found it tragic.
(story spoilers) for so many innocent to die such a horrible, twisted death is undeniably extremely tragic. Another piece of this feeling of tragedy and injustice is the large number of experiments that can be found. Helpless beings morphed together with machinery is a fate i would wish on few.
Now that i have gone over the good components of this game, i want to discuss the issues i had with it that i think are very important to make known before you buy this.
The combat in this game is beyond tedious.
For the majority of the game, you are armed with what is essentially a pogo stick. And fighting vicious, acid-spitting angry skin tags with a pogo stick that can only bounce twice before it has to recharge is incredibly frustrating. They attack frequently and hit hard, both at a range and close, so hitting them is quite the learning curve. In the 8.5 hours i spent playing through, a large chunk of it was spent dying in some stupid way to the walking scabs, reloading at the most inconvenient point and doing it all again.
That brings me nicely to my next point; the checkpoints could be greatly improved. Many of them are in places where if you die, you have to run a long way back to the thing that killed you, only for the very next thing to kill you, creating a very slow loop of progressing one monster at a time through an area, which is not the most exciting. There is one checkpoint in particular that is directly before a long animation, after which the intensity of combat suddenly increases twofold with no warning, causing you to watch the same animation of an elevator getting unstuck from a web of flesh one billion times.
TL;DR
Scorn was very well made from a storytelling perspective and is able to create a unique atmosphere of body horror and grotesque tragedy, but heavily lacks in the gameplay department, and can easily become infuriating, ruining immersion and your overall experience.
7/10, buy it if you really want a good story. or if its on sale and you're curious and have some money to spare.