The Becoming: Dehumanisation in Scorn

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Scorn, Die Hard, Get Out, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

When horror has terrified audiences, it's traditionally done it by exploiting the viewer, reader, or listener's relation to the main characters. If the work is knowingly fashioned, the person interacting with it can put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist, so when that character is confronted with mortal danger and extreme pain, mental or physical, the observer feels some measure of it, too. We also receive the suggestion that whatever is happening to the victim on screen could happen to us. In telling a story about Laurie Strode being hunted by Michael Myers, Halloween insinuates that we could be stalked by a serial killer. Get Out shows us a family controlling Chris Washington's mind, and through that, wants to convince us we could be subject to the same arrest of our free will.

Compare the lowest points of these horrors to scenes in other stories where villains get their comeuppance; there is satisfaction rather than disturbance in those moments because we are not meant to empathise with the bad guy. They represent an amorality that we cannot relate to. Think also about how shlocky horror with stupid or vapid protagonists tends to be less about panic and more about schadenfreude. We're unlikely to identify ourselves as dumb or empty people like that meat for the culling.

But the free-spirited young adults of Midsommar or the exhausted single mother of Babadook act as better conduits for suffering because they are rounded, and audiences can see parts of themselves in them. This is not to say that they aren't flawed. It's normal for horror characters to have defects because we all do. Up to a point, it makes them more relatable. But the secret ingredient is humanisation; that's what takes us from a blockbuster spectacle to a nightmare.

Fans of video games have often remarked that this medium lets us inhabit characters better than any other because we see through the eyes of the protagonist and control their movements. We are supposedly not just onlookers but a consciousness transplanted into them. That's only half-true because, typically, video games have been better at communicating physical information about a person rather than mental impressions. And as a medium, have prioritised forms of physical puppeteering over psychological autonomy. Games that let us move characters or have them pick up and operate equipment are a dime a dozen, but you have to go to some lengths to find video game dialogue that offers a rich representation of characters' mind or games with stats that reveal as much of a person's mental state as their physical state. There are lots of systems for governing a character's physical interactions with the world, but far fewer for organising their internal life.

Modelling madness, fear, and stress, the horror genre of games has had a unique reason to jump the medium's somatic fence and describe psychological demons. That motivation led to Silent Hill, Haunting Ground, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, among others. But a grounding in the body is not necessarily a bad thing. Action games (that's action in the sense of action films) use it to thrill through physical threat and empower through triumphs of durability, coordination, and raw force. Horror games have also found a rich deposit of scares in realising bodies and then lighting fires under their seats, having us run from the monsters, tip-toe around killers, and hold onto light sources for dear life. One of the most enduring fears of people, in general, is the fear of the body being destroyed. Many great corporeal horror games leave us one wrong turn from it for the better part of their duration.

As it is our intellect and emotional complexity that separates us from other animals, to be recognised only as a body is to be dehumanised, and no game represents that better than Ebb's 2022 horror, Scorn. Scorn is a first-person action-adventure which models our frame and increases our awareness of it through two means: Regular animation of that body and a world saturated in interfaces we must physically manipulate. It also uses the same body horror palette from which legends like the Cenobites and Pyramid Head were painted. Doughy, quadrupedal lumps of flesh, and birds that open up right down the middle skulk Scorn's gantries and hallways. Like other Cronenburgesque creations, they are menacing because they're predators but also because they are animated gore. They trip our innate sensor for injury and take what should be internal and make it external. We can then imagine what it's like to be that monster, and being skewed and kneeded so far from the human shape provokes anxieties over bodily violation. I feel on an ancient, instinctual level that these things should not exist.

In the fallen kingdom of Scorn, there is nothing sacred about the body. To us, the skin is a border that strangers are forbidden to cross without our permission. To the interlopers of this death-kissed landscape, there's no such taboo. We conceive of our skin as a point of delineation between the self and the other. Scorn does not recognise this distinction.

Unsurprisingly, some of this breaching of our shell and confusion between inside and outside is perpetrated by the aggressors that intrude on our bodies with acids and blunt force trauma. But it also arises from our towering parasite that eagerly claws away at the viscera within us. Much of the game is a swim against the current towards an extractor that would let us remove it. That swim takes us through mausoleums and machinery that are knitted from fabrics that appear or are certainly biological: Spine archways, veins matted across floors, fences like gills. We may remove an organ from our body to place it into a refilling station and have it returned to us. To revisit our earlier explanation of horror as suggestion, these ossified factories suggest that we might be cut up and have our guts strewn about or our bones turned into beams.

The gaming community immediately clocked that Scorn borrowed architecture from the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, but a lesser-known presence in this charnel house is the Polish Zdzisław Beksiński. Beksiński's paintings are no more optimistic than Giger's, but are less grey, and where Giger's pictures looked like reliefs, Beksiński's can stand as witness to sublime expanses, as can Scorn. Some more of Beksiński's possessions sitting in Scorn's trunk: Scorn's four-legged mammal is a cousin to Beksiński's Night Creeper, the humanoid servants in the final area have something of the artist's sapient corpses about them, and the flaking crimson decomposition from Beksiński's work also grows on some of this world's metal faces.

But Beksiński's children still take a back seat to Giger's because of Scorn's subsistence on that compound that Giger named: the "biomechanical". It's an ingredient in Scorn's art style and in its interactivity. The bridge to future levels only lowers when we pay some toll of labour to spur a dead assemblage of parts back to life. The biomechanical was always going to exist in Scorn because, without a recognition of the line between a person and their environment, this world cannot filter the organic from the technological. So, not only do organic parts appear in the mechanical, but the industrial washes back towards us. There are metal rods where the phalanges of fingers should be, armour worn below the skin, and a man melded with a metal trolley.

You reading this are familiar with the dynamic where you use machines, and a machine is what gets used, but if people can be part-machine and machines can be part-people, you can get used back. In the game, we free and then enslave a man so we have a second person to open a door working on the two-person rule, we crush a tiny humanoid (maybe a foetus) for its juice, we rip away at the sides of a giant to make new entrances through it, etc. I hate these beings because I pity them, and my abuse of them makes me feel guilty. Just look at the accusatory glances of the immobile creature we butcher.

Scorn is doing what biomechanical art has always done: weighing on our mind by suggesting that, for all our beliefs that we are distinguished from the purely material by our emotions and identity, maybe we're nothing more than parts. A pipe carries water, and likewise, vessels transport blood. Pistons can push masses, but so can muscles. Rebar holds up concrete, and bones hold up meat. Scorn has no speaking parts and offers little by the way of player choice. It's without language or self-expression. There is only the arteries and the intestines and the bones and the metal. And if you or anyone else is just an object, what respect do you owe them? What rights do you have?

And Scorn, like the most dismal biomechanical art, then paints the idea one shade darker. It says that not only are people utilities in this place, but that the utilities are breaking down. As in Giger and Beksiński's pictures, we find subjects long after expiration. The life-giving water and blood have dried up; this is a castle of fossils. You're begging for a world where everyone and everything can be exploited. Instead, your parasite gets hours to wreak havoc on your body, as the time you could be using to reach the cure is instead spent repairing what's broken. The wreck you inhabit is undergoing a slow death, and so are you.

Scorn makes sure you know you don't matter here and how decayed its physiology is by being as user-unfriendly as possible. There are too many things that the game does "wrong" by conventional review standards to register without boring you to tears, but I feel this list gives you a legitimate picture of its arguments with the player:

• The game is full of dead ends without clear signalling to distinguish between them and the desirable paths. A part 2 to this point: Where you've come from often looks like where you're going.
• Reloading weapons takes an eternity.
• The meter that shows your ammo often doesn't pop up until you try to reload.
• There's no map.
• The checkpointing is cruel and will take place before cutscenes and important milestones.
• Combat starts and ends abruptly.
• The melee gun is unresponsive.
• There are enemies who will suddenly appear and one-hit you.
• The design fails to tell you how systems work and then punishes you for not knowing.
• Near its end, the game introduces a mechanic where you can control more than one body at a time, only to use it for a single puzzle and then immediately abandon it.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Scorn was mistakenly unkempt, but the game is so competent in other areas (graphically, for example), and it hits the wrong notes with such a high success rate, you know it must have vandalised itself deliberately. In the same way that anti-comedy requires a steadfast understanding of how to make people laugh, Scorn's anti-satisfaction draws from a resolute knowledge of what players want to feel. Scorn is so consumed by spite that it would rather be received as hideous in its play than give you the false impression that it respects you.

If you can persevere through your deterioration and that of the production line you rely on, you can limp into a citadel lined with crass sculptures of enormous phalluses and fucking couples. The architecture is procreation. There is also a puzzle in which we place an organism into a humanoid's abdomen: impregnation. It's the promise of new life represented the only way Scorn knows how: through the purely biological. Here, you are able to remove the squatter occupying you, which then scuttles off, but the damage is done. Death is imminent. It's likely that you were so much parasite by this point that the surgery carved away a good amount of yourself. We use proxies to carry our dying body towards a light between two swirling columns of liquid; an unspecified salvation. This is, of course, the game getting your hopes up only to dash them. It's a convincing feint because the game just introduced a new mechanic, and designers never implement new rules in the minutes before an ending.

Horror fiction loves to fake that it's heading to a positive resolution, only to plunge you into the icy waters of the bad ending. These meanders put a point on the futility of fighting against its macabre forces. With an end to Scorn's tortures in sight, we find that the parasite has been lurking in the shadows, biding its time. Like any intelligent predator, it pounces when we are at our weakest. Reunited with it, we assume our final form: awake but eternally paralysed, a living flesh statue, exposed internals waving in the wind. It's quite like the ending of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Given our domineering approach to other life across the course of the game, this is one parasite joining with another.

By shunting us back into the physical, Scorn left us, like all machines, bound to break down eventually. If we were a spiritual being, we might have a soul that would live on. If we had personhood, we might have a legacy. But who buries a mechanism? Why mourn something that only existed to be used? For a machine, there is no heaven, and in a world without preservation, the obsoleted can only sit forgotten among the other detritus, oxidising into oblivion. Thanks for reading.