Scorn’s Development Hell Isn’t a Good Sign

In recent years, horror seems to have taken on a distinctly indie tone in the video game world, as the removal of the P.T. demo from the PlayStation Store in April 2015 seemed to ring a death knell for the AAA horror genre. Granted, Resident Evil Village was released to great fanfare but there’s no denying the fact that genre fans are still talking about the classics, games like Dead Space, as though they were released yesterday.

There are still plenty of interactive horrors out there, of course. The Alien, Metro, Outlast, and Amnesia series have done a fine job keeping the more grisly themes alive on mainstream consoles, while casino slots frequently come detailed with popular tropes such as zombies. In addition to Vampire: Princess of Darkness, Paddy Power’s casino has the Zillard King slot, which takes its cues from monster movies like Godzilla. It’s not uncommon for horror to be popular in slots, especially, with many games bringing in the classics with zombies, like the slot title The Walking Dead.

Dead Space: The Dead Space Retrospective

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As a big-budget effort, Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise seems to be running unopposed. The end of P.T. also meant the end of Silent Hill and the termination of creator Hideo Kojima’s relationship with Konami. Making matters worse is that high-profile efforts like Agony, a game about escaping damnation, were received poorly, not for the subject matter, but because it just wasn’t very interesting to play.

H. R. Giger

Ebb Software’s Scorn actually seemed like something unique in the genre back when it was announced, in 2014. Making the most of the techy, fleshy world of biopunk, once the stamping ground of artists like H. R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski, Scorn is a gloomy, surreal adventure on an organic planet. The player is cast as a seemingly newly-born humanoid creature trying to make sense of their bizarre world.

In essence, though, Scorn is a first-person shooter set in space. The monsters are suitably weird, and everything is bulbous, sticky, and gross. Its appeal as a horror game is undeniable. It’s nice that there are plenty of indie horrors out there but, after a while, they all start to look, sound, read, and play the same. There are only so many ways you can escape a haunted house, after all.

Scorn Gameplay Trailer

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Still, Scorn has been in what most observers would describe as development hell for almost a decade now, with the most recent delay in 2021 (to October 2022). Sadly, as anybody familiar with delayed games will be aware, they are rarely released in an ideal state. The graphical, technological, and gameplay changes that invariably occur during such long build cycles usually make sure of that.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

The archetype for this kind of stalled development is, of course, Aliens: Colonial Marines, which spent twelve years in the oven, only to almost land SEGA in legal trouble at release due to its low quality. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no case for rushing things out the door either. The number of games that simply didn’t work when they came out is one of the great embarrassments of the video game industry.

Overall, Ebb Studios would seem to be in the unenviable position of being trapped between needing to get Scorn out and not wanting to risk releasing a broken or incomplete product. If it manifests at its most beautiful/ugly best, though, the horror genre should finally have something original to play with.