TL;DR : I played this game in VR through a mod (UEVR), it was a great experience and felt like the game was made for it considering how contemplative and visually focused it is. It's world is left to your interpretation, there’s not a single spoken word in the whole game and no real cut scene. It's great only if you know what you're getting into, I know it was disappointing to some. It's not very long and apparently falls short compared to what was planned and advertised.


Gameplay in VR : I used UEVR to be able to "inject" (as it calls it) the game in the headset. You can find here the guide I followed https://youtu.be/4ccaX8Hr1JU?si=-mJiFSlZ4D1NkJTs
It took a bit of tweaking but after a bit of trial and error it became easy to follow the steps. You might need to disable your antivirus as one of the files you unzip keeps getting deleted by Windows.

The impressive, goric and dark world of Scorn is perfect for VR, you're often left looking around in awe at the size and weirdness of the place. There's two moments during the game that are probably the most jaw-dropping I've seen in VR.

Performance wasn't the best, I'm using the first Oculus headset that was released, and a 980ti which is getting a bit old now. The world clearly was less detailed than on a flat screen but the immersion was still totally worth the experience.

The gameplay itself being very basic it was fine in VR. Only issue was the combat, aiming wasn't easy at all. It's not like in HL:ALyx where you're free to physically move your hands to aim, you need to use joysticks like on a controller, which is even harder to do with the headset on. Maybe I could have tweaked the game a bit more with the tools though, once I managed to set up the camera right I went along with it. I avoided enemies as much as I could, and one specific fight had me reverting to my normal monitor to be able to aim better.


Gameplay in general

The game is maybe 40% walking, 50% puzzles and 10% combat.

If the world isn't of interest to you there's not really a point, rushing the game simply to reach the next puzzle without contemplating your surrounding would make it a pretty boring experience.

The puzzles can be level sized, in a Tomb Raider fashion, or more simple ones that you need to solve like a rubiks cube or something. I found the difficulty perfect, not too hard, not too easy. The very first one is maybe the hardest and it was a weird choice to have it this early in the game.

Once again, combat is really secondary and it's not the best fps you'll find. The best aspect of it is actually the design of the enemies and the weapons themselves more than how they all behave. You can also easily avoid 75% of the enemies by waiting a bit, which was helpful with in VR.


Atmosphere, theme

This is where the real value of the game lies, its world, its civilization, its beings, its technology... etc. It's gore, but not really scary, I don't think there has been a single jumpscare in the whole game. I've been terrorized at times but not by direct violence, it's much more psychological.

The influence of H.R. Giger is obvious and most people who are familiar with Alien will notice the resemblance with the Xenomorph and it's home world.
On top of the unsettling depictions of all of this weird bio-technology, where you don't know where the machine ends and the biological starts, many aspects are directly inspired or referencing the setting of LV426 (the eggs, the facehugger... etc).

I also learned about Beksiński while learning more about the game and you can really see the game as a mix of his depressing style and Giger's art. It's also how I would picture civilizations of older or more advanced species in Lovecraftian story.

The fact that it lacks a narration makes you wonder about the meaning behind everything. There's themes of birth, sexuality, exploitation, spirituality, civilization...

First of all, I see this world as humanity's doing. It doesn't look like it's a humanoid alien race, but actual humans, who built this place. Maybe on Earth, maybe not. It's probably too metaphorical to really matter, but it's still interesting to imagine the lore behind all of it.

It feels futuristic, but it's mechanical technology contrasts with how we tend to picture a dystopic digital future. It's some kind of mechanical cyberpunk dystopia.

You encounter many different species, some born from the collapse of this civilization and humanity, some exploited or bio-engineered by us. Suffering and exploitation are an integral part of everything, even while the civilization was thriving. It is built on horror. Everything is made in the image of the human body, of which you find hints in everything around you, it's hard to wrap your head around this world that seems to worship the body's physicality while also disrespect it so much in it's real biological form.

The game's name to me refers to humanity's relationship with itself, with life as a whole, seen as a means to a technological end. Our world has been built on the exploitation of a workforce as long as we've had social classes, from slavery to serfdom to today's proletariat. That's not even considering the catastrophic toll "humanity", or really, the way it organizes production and exploitation, has on life on Earth as a whole. Factory farming also isn't really that far from what we see depicted in this hell world.

I don't see this place as hell, it's very physical, concrete. It would seem meaningless if it wasn't for the very ending. All of the elements of this last place and it's puzzle makes you understand what the protagonist was chasing all along. It's a mystical spiritual place you try to reach after a lot of struggle, like in the movies Stalker or Annihilation.

Everything leads up to this weird climatic (and anti-climatic) place, where pain reaches it's apex but also allows you to reach a spiritual goal by joining a collective consciousness or mind, and entering a place that you've been chasing all along.
Maybe it's about the ♥♥♥♥ some can go through to reach a religious heaven, which in the end doesn't show up even show up, as the events unfolding in the game show. You're only left with the pain just as you thought you could finally reach nirvana.
The relationship between suffering and a spiritual goal also reminded me of the movie Martyrs, one of the rare ones I've seen where the story had a real meaning and impact to me.
Or it's just pure nihilism about how life is suffering, we try to give it meaning, and in the end you die.

There's a lot of lore that is shown in the artbook and I may get things wrong in my interpretation. It is such a rich universe, I wish more could have been shown.


As I understand it, the game was very divisive among the community expecting it. Some criticize it as a walking simulator, but it's also the fact that it was apparently supposed to be bigger than it ended up being, that it was over hyped and over-sold...

The steam page at the time said "Scorn takes place in an open-ended world with different interconnected regions." and it's very clearly not what we got.

It seems like it was rushed, a lot of content and playability cut, but the end result by itself was a very good experience to me.

The false advertising would have been my only criticism, but luckily I only purchased and played it a while after everybody.