I was excited for this because I love the movie - this has nothing to do with the movie. Apart from the appearance of stairs and someone being afraid of height. The story takes 4 hours to find a direction and then you swim for another 2 in a feverdream soap opera. The characters never get developed, none of the crimes really make sense and the cherry on top is you get gross misrepresentation of medical conditions. But that's not all that is bad. All of the gameplay is boring and not adding value to the game. I enjoy a good walking simulator - but they couldn't even get this right. None of your actions have consequences, none of your choices are choices. Graphics are nice, Animation is medium, Sound is off in a lot of places. The game edges you and never really gets around to tell you the story - but when it does it is so unsatisfactory and insane that you will probably feel betrayed for your time. Please DO NOT READ the following, I will spoil the story to show you how insane and nonsensical the writing is. I wonder how anyone thought this story is worth being told interactive - but then there is Pendulo and they have no judgement at all. A girl that went psychopath because of childhood abuse is adopted by a publisher. That publisher spends too much time with a writer that he is publishing. So the girl forms the plan to get rid of the writer to have daddy for herself. But the first plan to frame him with sexy pictures of herself fails and she lands herself in a mental institution. In which she kills her inmate and take on her identity. She then lives 8 years under that false identity, also has to kill the grandmother of her inmate friend. For some reason the inmate parents never discover who she is. But she manages to get a Yale degree in psychology in that time and applies for a position in the only mental institution close to the writer. Because her plan of revenge is to become his doctor and torture him further. But for that she has to get him committed. Which is easily done. She turns up at his house, wounded and drugs and seduces him. Then they do the deed and she spends 9 months being pregnant being offscreen some place else. Yes, actually... Then she returns to the writer with the baby and lures him into a relationship so that he develops a bond with the child. Then she fakes an accident to make the writer believe he killed her and the baby so that he tries to kill himself. But she already hired a third person to save him from that. And then she gets killed by the writers cat, who had it in for her from the start because the writer gave her a blanket that the cat wanted to sit on. So the moment you realize she is the killer is the moment you already know the crime has been punished because she is dead. All the bad deeds of hers get blamed on offscreen childhood abuse that turned her psycho. Which is a bold claim. Real life psychopathy works very different from whatever this story tells. Please take care of your mental health and don't indulge in bad representation like this.
It's a 5 hour game, the combat is clunky, there is no replayability. So let that reflect on how much you want to spent on it. But it also is a unique experience on a planet of yuck. The screenshots do some of it justice, but overall I would describe Scorn as an experience you reluctantly want to have. The game has no narrator but tells what little story it has with visuals or the interactions you can do with the world. It's a couple gunfights away from a narrative walking simulator. I have to say it took me a bit to want to play through this game. The whole setting is horrible, worse than that. You are on a planet that is barely alive, in a structure that used to do all kinds of horrible things to living beings and now you have to - And that question was the experience for me. This game doesn't need you to shoot up aliens to level up a hero, it doesn't need you to build a village for prosperity and the glory of your people. You cannot safe anyone in this scenario, but maybe you can safe yourself?!? but at the same time you as a human playing this are thrown into this uncanny world where there are clearly different understandings of morality and you are in a factory and you don't understand the purpose of it, but you know how to interact with it. So like a good worker boi you get up and you do your job. Because you have nothing else to go on here. And this feeling of looking for purpose and how you can find purpose and what you are and whom you are willing to sacrifice for it is what this game did for me. There are no answers to any of this but I really liked how this game asked the question. It took me around an hour to understand that the game can be more than puzzles and mediocre and frustrating combat mechanics. The game is super yucky, there are all sorts of body horrors in it, all sorts of horrific acts - so be aware of this. And the graphics and sound design drive this home.
The game is really 5/5 and all the good things people say about it are true. It gives you a lot of agency, it is weird and choices do matter. However, I had the game about 80% done and I softlocked because I failed a very important check. And this was a problem from the release on and it never got fixed and it never will be fixed because the game studio is dead. So I played for hours at this point, I am invested in the story and I wanted to see how it concludes with the character I became in this game. Then up comes this check for the one stat that I never in the entirety of this game had to roll for. I upped my chances a little with clothes and I think I even had a 70 or 80% chance to succeed. And I failed. and that was it. And apparently after this check you have to do the same check again! At this point all solutions to this are "do side quests and level up so you can retry the roll". But at this point I completed all the sidequests already. All of it. really. I would need a level up to try a reroll on a sidequest to finish a sidequest at this point. So now I just have the game installed and I let time pass till I am motivated enough to either find a cheat tool to manipulate the save file, start a new character with this specific check in mind or just uninstall and forget about this whole experience. For a game that does this many things right in an RPG genre it is unbelievable that they had this oversight. So if you like a game that you can definitely explore 80% of and then you have a 60% chance to see the rest of it then this is for you. Or you could spoil yourself and search for the softlock online. But what fun is a game that you have to spoil for yourself to be sure that you can have some closure.
As of 2022 this game is obviously dated, but this game has downsides and upsides to it. I will just lay those out for you and you can decide wether you want to spent time with it. I certainly enjoy the experience but it may not be for you. The combat system isn't as intricate as Dark Souls or even God of War. It is playable though and it is easy to pick up. Don't expect fights to feel supersmooth but don't expect them to be a tremendous amount of work as well. The story is tolerable. There's a lot of inconsistencies, often within the same dialog, but overall it is not the worst und uninteresting thing I have ever played. If you can get over relatively weak dialog or the occasional sexist trope then it is playable. If I had to give you one example of inconsistency its probably that the main character is a woman whose only goal it seems to be to be married to a knight in shining armor. Which is of course the goal of all women in life. And even after she is a person of her own she will still be dependant on that male figure - which is kind of ridiculous because it doesn't work for a hero character to be this dependant on an npc. The graphics are fine but on my PC bright colors are glowing horribly. Overall it cannot stand up to modern games at all, but if you are into old graphics they work out fine. I have certainly seen games that aged worse. The textures and models are consistent. Sounds are just like the graphics tolerable and yet a little off sometimes. What you get is a playable game that is easy to pick up. It has certain RPG Elements, like distributing character stats and skills, you can loot and pick different weapons, there are dialog choices which rarely have real impact, the fighting is Dark Souls lite, the story is keeping you somewhat interested and there are quite some puzzles which I found rather refreshing. I've always loved the Uncharted, Lara Croft pace of fighting and then doing some puzzling. 4or5/5 when it came out, 3/5 because it aged
Where I come from and maybe what I expected: (skip if you like) I played SW1 with a passion. SW1 gave you what you expect from a shooter like Doom, Quake or the likes. A linear storyline, tunnel like maps which sometimes feel like tunnels, a fixed set of weapons and unlocks. SW1 had some pretty nice mechanics tho. First of all the katana being viable as one of your main weapons made a shooter very melee heavy. Then you could also level perks in an RPG-like fashion. Overall I foung SW1 by accident and I was very happy with it. SW 2 is different in a lot of regards. The maps are used over and over again, modified by story states. Which is kind of okay. You can modify weapons now - which is a fun system only a little clustered after a while. Perks are fun and well designed Story is fun and funny! Really bad jokes as always! lovin that Graphics look great Sound is great Multiplayer is probably great too - have not tried Overall you can see this game was made to play it in multiplayer. Which is why a lot of sacrifices to the single player experience have been made. Which means it is for single players somewhat less gripping. Does not make it bad, just puts a glass ceiling on being really good at a single player experience. In a way you can compare this to Shooters like Borderlands, even GTA in a way. It uses elements of those when it comes to reusing the map with new quests. I did enjoy SW1 quite a lot more because the story kept me going a lot more in SW1. In SW2 you pick a "Mission" and do that, which is very different from just going deeper down one rabbit hole. Overall: It's a 3-4/5 game. It's average when you only play single player but it still has a lot of things you might really enjoy. the weapon modifying system, graphics, the jokes - really could be a lot of those things that have been done well here. It will very likely be an enjoyable or even quite enjoyable game for you.
So I just played 3 hours or so of this. And I do not get what happens. The game throws cryptic messages at you and you are supposed to guess what is supposed to happen. More often than not nothing will happen - which leads to losing the game. It is a heavy trial and error game and a lot of things are based on chance. The concept is not bad at all. Actually quite intriguing. I played 4 or 5 different "classes" and they all played very different from each other. Some make constant income hard, others character progression very easy, some let you grow your group faster others don't. I love clicker games, and it somewhat reminded me of one. You can pause the game at any time and you will have to because at some point things progress fast. The losing conditions are not obvious. The Interface is adjustable - but this makes it a mess most of the time and causes you to miss certain things. It is a wild guessgame, you figure one thing out and then the next time it doesn't work as you wanted it to. I am sorry to say that this whole thing has been a horrible experience as a game for me. Maybe I should consult tutorials for it but honestly I don't even care any more. Any game should provide a basic tutorial to explain what happens and a UI that helps the player understand what is going on. This game does not. It lets you organize your cards yourself and it has way too many different variants. Some cards can be put in slots but won't work and there is no explanation why. The cards are not marked other than by name. But apparently some people enjoy it so check the other reviews if you might enjoy it
So the upside is that this game has atmosphere. The sounds are nice, the music is nice, the artstyle is nice - you get this Vikings TV series feeling On the downside it's not very good at what it is. It is an Action RPG, like Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile. While I have hundreds of hours playtime in those ARPGS I doubt this one will keep my attention for very long. The main reason for this is that the Action part (meaning the fighting) is clumsy and unpolished. Sadly so, but it is what it is. Targeting some monsters is incredibly hard, like swooping ravens for example. Avoiding attacks is possible but no fun since there are little indicators when the attack will actually hit - and if you roll into the enemy it will just push them back. I encountered a few instances where my character would get stuck behind an unbreakable object and it was very hard to get unstuck. Once my path was blocked by a wooden building - which I could destroy, but figuring out that it takes three precice attacks was a little annoying. This game has a lot going for it, I say if you like the Vikings setting and feeling it is playable in some way - but it is just very far from Game of the Year. Some really cool things I liked: - The mechanic of seeking shelter (although not 100% well executed a very good idea) - The setting and the according figures (e.g. Bosses, lots of Viking name drops, it is just very true to the Viking background) - The crafting instead of buying feature - The souls-like leveling up (I like the mechanic of it but I doubt it fits this game in the long run) - Village progression and unlocking npcs by story missions - overall storyline is entertaining
The retro graphics and controls are the only thing retro about this game. The voices are on point, the music sets a nice atmosphere and the story makes fun of itself and of the genre Adventure Games. There are definitely some good laughs in there for older and younger players alike - although you will enjoy the game a bit more if you have played the old Maniac Mansion. It's quite a long game, the puzzles are challenging (on the hardmode) and can be figured out. Meaning they are logically well designed which keeps the frustration very low. You can however obtain items to puzzles that are in later chapters of the game which confused me a bit. The end was a tiny but unsatisfying; but still - this game is a 4.5 star gane, at least in my book. I lost my heart to Adventure Games and this one is very well done. It is quirky enough to feel old and innovative enough to play fresh. Open your wallets and reboot your Commodore for the world of Thimbleweed Park.
This game is very very good! The press knew it, the gamers who played it knew it, Pandemic Studios knew it and sadly EA did not care. For some reason Pandemic got shut down before they could even fix all the bugs in the game or release planned DLCs or god forbid a sequel. I played this game on PS3, but the Xbox version looked slightly better and the PC version looked a lot better. The gameplay is closest to Assassins Creed mixed with a bit of GTA and a feeling of the Mafia games. Although I never really was a huge fan of Assassins Creed games this game got me good. The feeling you get when walking through black and white areas is intense and you feel so happy when you freed an area and you see color return to the peoples lives. The cars are fun to drive, the guns are fun to shoot, combat is balanced. The voiceacting has minor flaws but overall I enjoyed it a lot (and I pick on voiceacting a lot), the soundtrack is so good that I sometimes returned to this game just for the soundtrack. If you can look past some bugs this game is so worth it. It is definitely not a bugfest. Depending on how much time you put into this game of course you will find more bugs. Sometimes you will see a tank spawn on a wall, hopping up and down and taking damage until it explodes. The bugs are more funny than gamebreaking. Overall this game had a feel to it that I never got anywhere else and that is why I recommended it to so many people - sadly probably noone will have played it. If you have the slightest inkling to buy this game or you feel like you might enjoy it - please buy it and give it a try! It was a 40 hour fun game for me.
