Scorn is a remarkable example of a game with a solid art style, but poor game design beyond the impressive visuals.

The most common critique of Scorn I've seen is that the combat is clunky, but in the whopping four hours it took me to complete this $40 game (including pause breaks), I've found that the issues spread far beyond the combat.

The issues with Scorn lie with having large, detailed levels but with very little to do in them aside from walk through corridors and solve the occasional puzzle, with some very basic (and clunky) combat thrown in from time to time. The levels themselves are expansive enough to feel labryinthian, with backtracking being a common occurrence as you try to remember where you have and have not yet explored. For me, this process took up at least half of the game's running time.

Aside from the walking simulator aspect and the clunky combat, the story is, for better or worse, virtually nonexistent; you will find just about zero explanation as to why anything in Scorn is the way that it is. To me, this struck me as a world with an incredible amount of potential for explaining how things ended up this way, but quite literally zero insight is offered at any point.

Lastly lies the issue of the game's length - as mentioned prior, it took me, with no usage of guides and including pause breaks, no more than four hours to complete the entire game. With another twenty or so minutes to finish the only missable achievement, Scorn clocked in at roughly four and a half hours of running time. This is a remarkably short runtime for a game that asks for forty bucks when not discounted and which offers such shallow gameplay.

I'd only recommend trying Scorn on a deep discount, and with the very tempered expectation that you're paying to walk through a viscera-based theme park, not a fully fledged game.

Visually it's great, but combat is terrible, puzzles are hard and some are just frustratingly stupid.

It's very unsettling (and beautiful)