Just played a few hours - mixed feelings. Not read through the thread and only skimmed the 4/10 and 1/5 reviews to see how fair I felt they were so far.
The good: the atmosphere is an 11/10 for those who dig it. I'm an Alien fan, a Giger fan, a body horror fan, and they absolutely nail it all. It's gross and icky and I want to bathe in its ickiness. This is all I really wanted from Scorn in the first place. The puzzles themselves are mostly an excuse to walk around the world, but there's some clever little ones in there that I enjoyed solving. Great animations, great sound design, it's just a treat for horror fans to look at.
The bad: twofold, mostly. Other smaller bugs aside, the main one is that I'm getting a really annoying single second freeze every time I hit an enemy with any weapon. Doesn't sound that problematic, until you get to the main problem; the combat is dross. It's just not good, it's clearly tacked on to a different game than the developers were making originally and it feels really janky. Closest comparison point is Subnautica's combat, it's a cold turd...
The ugly: .... which leads to my biggest issue with Scorn, which is that the checkpointing system has dropped me before a room full of enemies with one hit of health left, no way to get it back, and coupled with the shitty combat and freeze I'm getting, is genuinely making me consider just flipping on cheat engine so I don't have to worry about it again. It just isn't fun at all right now. They should at the very least restore your health to full on reloading after death, even without giving you any "health packs", or at least the game's equivalent. It's something I really do think they're going to patch in, at least as some sort of toggle, because the idea of loading back to an earlier save to re-do "press the buttons in order" puzzles just to have more health later is absurd.
It's frustrating because the good is SO good. Right now, it's hard to argue against the 6-7/10 reviews, although I do feel the super low ones are unfair, it's definitely not a one star game. I think anyone who expected an FPS and is disappointed did that to themselves, I don't know WHAT bit of PR you've seen over the last 8 years or whatever that's convinced you it's anything other than a gross Giger puzzle game. The sad thing is, they actually DID tack and FPS on and it's dire.
Update: just realised it's bugged out and not given me any achievements either - don't give a shiny shit personally but that'd be enough to drive some people here off a cliff!
Update 2: went back and fought through it, found a route to run past everything to a healthy station and a pillar I could use to LOS and kill everything, so I can continue okay. Still doesn't feel fun to play that part, but I'm glad I'm back on the road with the stuff I like.
(
) the rest have been relatively simple so far.looking for the arm thing for the dismembered arm
