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If you prefer your horror games to be slow, unsettling, and crawling under your skin, Scorn is a gory indie title that you need to play. Scorn first released on PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, but Ebb Software has since announced at Gamescom that it’ll be arriving on PS5 on October 3.
With Halloween just around the corner, October is a better time than ever to play Scorn, if you’re not being swallowed up by the vast expanse of space in Starfield, or turning Mario into an elephant in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
Ultimately, there’s a lot of games to be filling up your gamer plate with during the coming months, but if you’ve a weekend to spare puzzling over Scorn’s intricate environment, it’s well worth it.
That said, reviews of Scorn were rather mixed, so this story of a world scorned might not be for everyone; you’ll soon see why.
Inspired by the artwork of H. R. Giger (of Alien fame) and Zdzisław Beksiński, Scorn thrusts you into a desolate, decrepit world full of humanoids and alien contraptions. Without a hand to hold (a human one, anyway), you’re left to your own devices as you try to navigate this incredibly disorienting environment.
This is a huge part of why Scorn is quite like Marmite, destined to be loved or loathed by its players; it’s a troubling world that can be so difficult to navigate that many players will bash their head against one of the organic walls and never return. For those who keep going, however, it’s a wholly immersive horror experience that takes environmental storytelling to the extreme.
In the most respectful way possible, Scorn is one big mess; its world begs you to thrust your fingers into strange, fleshy crevices, and roam myriad corridors made of what you can only assume to be muscles and fat. You’ll run into endless humanoid corpses that have you questioning your own fate, and highly disturbing, disgusting creatures that clearly aren’t happy to see you alive. Scorn is incredibly good at putting you on edge, from start to finish; you never know when, or if, you’re safe.
With little to no dialogue, no quest markers, and no UI, you’re left to work things out on your own. It’s increasingly difficult, but that’s part of what makes Scorn so rewarding. As a lone, living humanoid with no answers as to why you woke up here, you must work each puzzle out on your own, ultimately patching together your own story in the process.
It’s certainly not for the faint of heart, but for those who take great pleasure in immersive horror experiences, Scorn is one of the best of recent years. I won’t deny that it definitely tests players’ patience and can become frustrating without a nudge in the right direction, but those who make it to the end of this short indie will likely feel a profound sense of achievement.
Scorn is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S, and will launch on PlayStation 5 on October 3 of this year, with pre-orders available now. Let us know what you think if you’ve played it, or plan on playing it on PS5!