izigame.me

Scorn is definitely a unique experience. I say experience because it's less of a traditional game and more akin to an interactive movie in a sense. There are high points and low points, and unfortunately I feel the lows outweigh the highs, so I cannot recommend Scorn for a few reasons. I'd really like to, but it feels like the bad just barely edges out the good.
Let's start with the good first. The visuals are fantastically done. Scorn shines in the artistry. The team nailed it there. Everything looks fantastic. The H.R. Geiger aesthetic has not been handled better since Aliens in my opinion, and you can see the attention to detail is present everywhere. Performance is also fantastic. I'm playing on outdated hardware and it's very smooth. The team made Unreal Engine 4 behave very nicely.
Sound is a bit so-so. The effects sounds are fine, but for an atmospheric game I feel there was not enough effort spent on the soundscape. There is some immersive ambience as opposed to music, but It just felt a bit lacking in that department.
There are puzzles that must be solved for progression, and this has its upsides and downsides as well. In one sense, some of the puzzles are very clever in their execution. You have to move real-world objects around to progress, not just "find key to open door", though there certainly is an equivalent of that present here. The only really annoying puzzle is found early on where you have to slide some "eggs" around on a wall to release the correct one into a machine. It's just a tedious variation of a "slide the blocks" puzzle. The other puzzles do not hold your hand in any way. You MUST figure everything out on your own. This might be a turn-off to some players as some of the puzzles are not entirely intuitive. There's a bit of real-world problem solving involved. On the other hand, the progression is fairly linear so if you're stuck on something it's not to far to backtrack to figure out what you're doing wrong, and once you've solved it, you know for certain that you've solved it.
Combat is where things start to get a bit lackluster. There are only five types of enemies - including the "boss" fight near the end, and your weapons are woefully inadequate. For the weapons, there's a melee weapon that doubles as a key. It can "fire" two shots before needing to recharge. It's basically a captive piston, and it's pretty weak. There is a pistol that can hold six shots, and it takes a long time to aim it effectively, but it's also very weak. The shotgun is VERY powerful, but holds only three shots, and finally there is a grenade launcher. Unfortunately by the time you get the grenade launcher you use it in exactly one fight, which happens immediately after acquiring it, and after that it's really only used to solve three environmental puzzles. You can carry only a very small amount of reserve ammo for any weapon, and the refilling stations for health and ammo are very scarce and typically become exhausted after a single interaction.
The enemy types consist of a stationary tentacle that can fling acid at you, a crawling meat sack that will try to vomit acid on you at close range, a smaller meat sack with... baby bird wings?... that will spit a glob of acid at you VERY accurately from a distance, a larger quadrupedal meat sack that will charge like a bull and takes a full magazine from anything to put down, and finally a cybernetic monstrosity that serves as the end boss.
The combat overall is soured by the fact that the weapons are largely ineffective against the enemies, coupled with the fact that health and ammo is incredibly scarce, so there is zero margin for error. To fire a weapon you must hold down an "aiming" key, and for the pistol to hit with any degree of accuracy you have to STAND COMPLETELY STILL while aiming, which gives the evil little chicken things plenty of time to land one or two shots on you, which severely depletes your health. In addition, by the time you get the pistol you're likely to be facing three enemies at a time. Aiming takes an eternity, reloading takes an eternity, and to avoid getting hit you MUST sprint, and guess what you can't do while sprinting? Seasoned FPS players will find this frustrating beyond belief. Combine that with the fact that there are specific cut scenes that involve your life being drained by a full bar as part of the story progression, and if you're left with almost no health after a fight the subsequent cinematic could end you. Fighting the boss is a bit unintuitive as well, making it easy to waste precious ammo unnecessarily.
The worst bit, however, is the ending. It's painfully clear how the game had to be cut and its ending tacked on. Very little is explained or made clear as to why anything is happening, and from what I've read, some of this is explained in the art book as having been kept deliberately vague, but once you get to the ending it feels like the entire thing was a colossal waste of time. It's not simply the fact that it is a negative ending - that's a common trope within the sci-fi horror genre. What bothered me is that it felt lazy, or at least rushed, in its execution. It was definitely a "That's IT?" moment. Ending a game on a negative note is one thing. Ending it on disappointment is another matter.
After my own experience, I wish I could recommend Scorn due to the effort involved in creating a very visually immersive environment, but that in and of itself just doesn't seem to be enough to justify the time spent playing through. It's a largely empty world with very difficult and tedious combat midway through and some puzzles that can be fairly tough at times. If you can see past the downsides the visuals are fantastically executed. That being said, it feels a bit unfinished. Scorn definitely needed more time to complete and a lot more polish to be what it could have been.