Scorn
February 20, 2026
As the cultural imprint of videogames continues to grow, bigger budget games have continued to blur the lines between game and cinematic experience. At times games structure themselves much like a tv series or movie, others aspire to narrow the aesthetic distance between reality and simulation with their pursuit of graphical fidelity and even casting real life actors. These steps result in ballooning budgets, and with those costs come a desire to recoup the investment. This can impact a game's design on a fundamental level. Mechanical friction sanded down, story telling blunted, topics conventionalized, may the widest net catch the most fish. To be clear, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Big popular things are oftentimes cool. Sometimes big popular things miss their marks and then they are even cooler. Still, when more and more games chase this same target, these big popular things come off as hackneyed. At the same time, plenty of games (more in fact), ignore this chase. No intention of acting as broadcast media, and happy to exist as its own separate thing in its own separate place.
Within this cultural milieu enters Scorn, a game both engaged in and intentionally subverting this aforementioned cinematic pursuit. That is at least how I perceived it, maybe in part because I was hot off the quinquennial 'are videogames art' discussion. Regardless, for those that do want videogames to be taken seriously as an artform, games such as Scorn demand attention. In the early stages of Scorn, you would be forgiven for writing it off as having no locomotion and no story, relying instead on the energy emitting from its art direction. Maybe atmosphere and art is simply the reason for the season. This impression grows when you start to engage with very rudimentary puzzles that are dressed with incredible artistic flourishes ripped straight from the design manuals of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński.
Once the introductory act concludes, you start to realize the game is doing more with its story, an experiment in subtlety. Rather then tell you what happened, rather than acknowledge that something even happened, you only get a suggestion. Whether something happened, and if so, what--that is all the table setting you get here before you're off to suss out the rest of that puzzle. I haven't seen it since 2011, but it reminded me of when I saw Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. At the time, I was on some lists to get into preview screenings of movies. You often would just be told a time to show up and a length of the film, no other context. Seeing this movie under those circumstances made it easier to fall under its spell. Still, it was clear that the movie was less concerned about entertaining the viewer and more focused on evoking an emotional reaction. Scorn seems to be comfortable living in that same space, and it deserves some credit for it. As I'll get into in a moment, there are other aspects holding this game back, but the game's comfort in just sitting in these impeccable artistic spaces and letting you vibe is laudable.
On the design front, the spaces are fully realized. It is a wonderful thing to think you're wandering down a stray hallway then find yourself overlooking a place previously explored. Parts of the maps weave between, over, and under themselves with origami-like precision. This serves the game well, not only does is elevate the art, but it at times elevates the puzzles--allowing you to rely on spatial reasoning in a way many games can not. The user interface too is impressively minimal. Certain things like health power-ups don't occupy an ever-present asset in the corner of your screen, but instead sit at your character's beltline. If you want to know how much you're carrying, take a look buddy! Other games have done this, sure, but these pieces add up and emphasize a cohesion to the game at large.
To quickly touch on the negative. It is the combat. Stretching back towards where I began here, the combat feels like something tacked on for the purposes of putting more features in a trailer or on the box. The game still deals with it intentionally, especially in the later acts, where the need to commit harm is unavoidable, and presented in stride with the other horrors of the game. Still, the combat is fiddly, it is a pain to engage with, and I am not confident that the game would be worse off without it. Still, I would encourage players to press on despite the combat. If you play this game, you need to see it to the final act. The different elements motioned at throughout the game are all brought to bear in the final act. Somehow, everything is elevated in the last moments of the game, even the art design somehow finds another gear. The puzzles, the combat, and the story all harmonizing boldly after hours restraint. By the end, the game even engages with its own title, somehow becoming the last piece you need to complete this puzzle box of a game. Striking stuff.
head on home
Within this cultural milieu enters Scorn, a game both engaged in and intentionally subverting this aforementioned cinematic pursuit. That is at least how I perceived it, maybe in part because I was hot off the quinquennial 'are videogames art' discussion. Regardless, for those that do want videogames to be taken seriously as an artform, games such as Scorn demand attention. In the early stages of Scorn, you would be forgiven for writing it off as having no locomotion and no story, relying instead on the energy emitting from its art direction. Maybe atmosphere and art is simply the reason for the season. This impression grows when you start to engage with very rudimentary puzzles that are dressed with incredible artistic flourishes ripped straight from the design manuals of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński.
Once the introductory act concludes, you start to realize the game is doing more with its story, an experiment in subtlety. Rather then tell you what happened, rather than acknowledge that something even happened, you only get a suggestion. Whether something happened, and if so, what--that is all the table setting you get here before you're off to suss out the rest of that puzzle. I haven't seen it since 2011, but it reminded me of when I saw Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. At the time, I was on some lists to get into preview screenings of movies. You often would just be told a time to show up and a length of the film, no other context. Seeing this movie under those circumstances made it easier to fall under its spell. Still, it was clear that the movie was less concerned about entertaining the viewer and more focused on evoking an emotional reaction. Scorn seems to be comfortable living in that same space, and it deserves some credit for it. As I'll get into in a moment, there are other aspects holding this game back, but the game's comfort in just sitting in these impeccable artistic spaces and letting you vibe is laudable.
On the design front, the spaces are fully realized. It is a wonderful thing to think you're wandering down a stray hallway then find yourself overlooking a place previously explored. Parts of the maps weave between, over, and under themselves with origami-like precision. This serves the game well, not only does is elevate the art, but it at times elevates the puzzles--allowing you to rely on spatial reasoning in a way many games can not. The user interface too is impressively minimal. Certain things like health power-ups don't occupy an ever-present asset in the corner of your screen, but instead sit at your character's beltline. If you want to know how much you're carrying, take a look buddy! Other games have done this, sure, but these pieces add up and emphasize a cohesion to the game at large.
To quickly touch on the negative. It is the combat. Stretching back towards where I began here, the combat feels like something tacked on for the purposes of putting more features in a trailer or on the box. The game still deals with it intentionally, especially in the later acts, where the need to commit harm is unavoidable, and presented in stride with the other horrors of the game. Still, the combat is fiddly, it is a pain to engage with, and I am not confident that the game would be worse off without it. Still, I would encourage players to press on despite the combat. If you play this game, you need to see it to the final act. The different elements motioned at throughout the game are all brought to bear in the final act. Somehow, everything is elevated in the last moments of the game, even the art design somehow finds another gear. The puzzles, the combat, and the story all harmonizing boldly after hours restraint. By the end, the game even engages with its own title, somehow becoming the last piece you need to complete this puzzle box of a game. Striking stuff.