I really want to like Scorn. It’s a light Myst-clone cosplaying as an HR Giger artbook. That in itself should either pique your interest or make you turn away disappointed. Sadly, regardless of your interest, it’s a sickening game. Quite literally.

After about an hour of play, I felt a bit sick. A slight headache and a nauseous feeling in the stomach, made me wonder what was going on. A quick web search made it clear this is rather “normal”. Apparently Scorn has its FOV set to a claustrophobic level and the various blurring techniques and camera cadence conspire to produce a feeling akin to motion sickness or cyber sickness (for VR enthusiasts). It’s quite disturbing and like a lot of other people on the Internet, I find it oddly fitting. Nevertheless, I cranked the level of sickness down through some setting manipulation and it’s doable now.

What about the game itself? Well, as mentioned it feels a bit like Myst. You’re scouring through various locations, trying to find the switches and manipulating them in the correct order to unlock the way forward. The gimmick of course, being that everything is shown in HR Giger-esque style. Those are effective for about the first fifteen minutes, after which they quickly become “the environment”. The game manages to catch you off guard as it introduces new objects and… other things, but the unease in-game isn’t as harsh as I expected.

It does manage to instil a sense of terror though. After some time playing the game introduces enemies. And with enemies comes combat, and here it drops the ball completely. You get a sort of piston-pistol: a extendible hook you can forcibly inject into targets. Twice. After which the weapon needs to recharge. Slowly. The result is a weird dance in which you engage with infinitely more dextrous enemies, waiting for your piston to fire twice, hopefully hit something and then wait again. With one enemy it’s annoyingly imprecise process. With two enemies it’s a frustrating dance towards death. With three enemies you might as well make a run for it.

Maybe this is trying to replicate the Resident Evil school of combat; make combat unwieldy and slow as to heighten the tension. Personally, I think it’s plain awful. It also feels out of place, as the mechanics are introduced rather late and the focus on puzzles makes this come across as anything but an action game, yet here we are.

Again, I really want to like Scorn, but it’s doing a lot to make sure I really don’t like it. I can live with the unease of its design style, and to a certain extent the nauseating effects of its graphical settings, but throwing me into a genuinely awful combat loop while slowly upping the amount of enemies is grinding away my patience. As such, you might as well avoid the game altogether.