There is no birth without sex, no life without birth, no birth without life, and no life without death. This cyclical motif is sewn throughout Scorn, running through it like a rotting umbilical cord. It’s a world where animal and automation are fused together in an uneasy alliance, blended so seamlessly you’re never entirely sure where organic matter ends and machine begins.
For such a taciturn game – Scorn has no text prompts, no dialogue, and no map; you move through its world by organic exploration, hope, luck, and nothing more – this circle-of-life stuff is surprisingly in your face. Before you’re out of the opening hour, you will have pried a deformed form from a rotting egg and ripped an organic weapon from its umbilical holster moments before you’re soaked in a thick, milky substance so overwhelming, it knocks you out. At the end, there are statues in, uh, compromising positions. Swollen abdomens and yes, more umbilical cords. Subtle this is not.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Scorn is ripe with phallic imagery and actions. Our protagonist – a half-dead husk of a humanoid roaming around a (mostly) deserted alien world – endlessly thrusts their weapon into mysterious holes and sinks their fingers into fleshy control panels. There are holes and tubes and thrusting pistons – enough to make Freud blush – all openly inspired by the nightmare dreamscapes of the grimly delightful H.R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksiński. It is stunningly disgusting and disgustingly stunning in all the right ways and for all of Scorn’s faults – and I have a few, I’m afraid – its meticulously detailed aesthetic is not one of them.
Source – eurogamer.net
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