i kickstarted this game way back in 2017 and have been tracking its fraught development ever since - and it was in development before the kickstarter! i have been anticipating it for years, have played through the assorted demos provided to backers, and overall have been absolutely rabid for this very niche game for a very long time.

i think a fun place to start with this, to give you an idea of my expectations, is what i wrote down before the game released but after playing through the prologue a few times. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILERS. I WILL BE SPOILING MANY THINGS GOING FORWARD AND DOING SO IMMEDIATELY!! read over this image and see how it compares to my final (but as of this writeup, still evolving!) understanding of the game.

PLEASE NOTE: i will be stating things as 'fact' just to avoid a lot of tedious repeating of caveats, but understand the things i am saying are JUST MY OPINION on how i PERSONALLY interpreted the world. you may have seen it totally differently, and that's great! i hope you do an excruciating writeup about scorn somewhere and let me read it!!

i’m glad i did this writeup because it's a great jumping off point for where my understanding of the world landed after i played through the whole game. let’s just get right into it!!

scorn's menu screen is not of the scornguy you play, but a parasite that has been warped by the fuel-like substance that explodes from the strange twisted mechanism that is the final puzzle of the prologue. this parasite rapidly infests the character you actually play, who is born into a desolate, unforgiving landscape just as the parasite, presumably, once was. looking down, you can even see that the parasite has the arm/hand key from the prologue still, and at the end of the game you see it in full as you attempt to pry it off before it consumes you completely.

it does anyway, just a few steps away from some kind of singularity - you don't know what's beyond this rift, but it has to be better than where you are, right? you'll never know - you're now rooted to the spot together, facing away from it, another twisted knot of biomass that might very well fill this area and block it off, plugging up what might be the only hint of hope in this world. THE END.

grim! devastating! beautiful! let's get embarrassingly sincere about scorn!

PROLOGUE. as it turns out, this prologue takes place closer to the fall of this strange civilization than the rest of the game. the future parasite has stumbled from the same birthing wall as the eventual protagonist but he makes a mistake and tumbles down a hole. your task, it's easy enough to assume, is to get OUT of that hole. this particular hole houses some kind of processing facility for extremely disposable mold people, and there are many pits of peculiar white, wormy slurry that has a red liquid film sitting on top. it moves faintly, though it's unclear if that's under its own power or because of some deeper mechanism keeping it from going solid. there are machines analogous to oil derricks planted in several of these, insinuating that it is some kind of precious resource being pumped up from beneath this area. this fuel is almost directly analogous to oil in that it is used not only as a power source but like oil, can be turned into other things. plastic, for instance! instead of plastic, it’s biomass that's to injected into the molds to make the mold people, who are themselves a kind of resource. something about using this biomass to create another life form alters its make-up and creates another, more valuable resource. perhaps they were used as workers as well, but by the end of scorn civilization, all they wanted was whatever Special Goo they could collect from them in their frenzy to achieve transcendence.

the factory, such as it is, is cruel. whoever left all this behind didn’t even turn off the lights before they left, focused entirely on themselves, and so everything continues to run until it breaks down even though there is no purpose to it anymore. most of the eggs have fossilised, the things inside are dead, but there is one pod in the growing wall that seems to be the last one to develop, a late bloomer. you kill it immediately, its shell not hardened enough to survive being pulled from its incubator. there's one more, fused to a fossilised pod, and the mold man inside is very much alive, terrified and panicked as you wheel it around and subject it to an assortment of horrors. you're presented with a choice but ultimately, both choices are cruel. you can grind him out of his shell but your character treats him as no more than a tool, watching coldly as he struggles to stand and walk, jamming his hand into an orifice you know will hurt him, forcing him to be a key and leaving him trapped in the area you are seeking to escape. your other choice is to scoop him out of the shell, killing him, the remains dumped unceremoniously below so you can snatch his severed arm to serve as a much more efficient key. if you leave him alive, the door closes behind you, but if you jam in his severed hand, the door remains open.

neither matters. both choices are cruel, and you must make them or you'll be stuck there too. this is a world consumed with cruelty, and by the end, it makes sense even if it is devastating to understand: cruelty is the point.

the next portion of the factory is a level up. you grab a piston-like weapon and are tasked with powering up some kind of pillar. the pillar is surrounded by strange knobby growths, flesh girded with tortured patterns of bone, a shape you see at the very end of the game - these, too, are living things, tended by automated machines that mist them with a corrosive substance to keep their growth in control. another level of biomass refinement - there are derricks here, too, pumping up more biomass from below. adding the nodes - filled with some kind of bioluminous catalyst that causes a reaction, that converts the biomass into power - to the pillar opens some grates to the outside, showing you a vast spine-like structure that reaches out into the gloom, some means of transporting product away from the facility. it's clear the area is overgrown as the machines have only just now been activated by you after who knows how long. there are piles of mold people left to rot, as though the machine was carelessly left on when it was abandoned, producing material until the whole thing clogged up and shut down.

that clog proves to be your undoing. when you insert the final catalyst node, presumably to get to the transport bridge, toward the place you've been drawn to since you emerged, the entire system backs up and explodes, pumping now catalysed biomass into the chamber and enveloping you.

the catalysed biomass is not inert. its properties are mutagenic now instead of passively waiting to be injected into a mold, and normally its effects are controlled and steered. not here. you are immersed in it, and maybe you should die, but you don't. instead, you go through a second gestation, cocooned, and become something else, a perversion of a divine form you see depicted later in the game. when you awaken, it's because the presence of another living thing, another you, is here, and everything comes flooding back to you. you still need to get out, to get There, but your motivations have been warped by the vast amount of time you've been hibernating, by how your body has been twisted and remade.

this is where the New You comes in, and where the game properly starts.

THE REST OF THE GAME:you are birthed from a wall into a blasted landscape. this is to me the place that i have the most questions, and would probably have the most answers to explain the rest of the world. has this place always been this way, or was it transformed by the relentless drive for ascension? this wall seems to extend off beyond your limited vision - was this crater created, or was it found this way? are the people birthed from this wall indigenous, or is this just a strange means of colonisation? is it a failed attempt at terraforming? unlike the rest of what you encounter throughout the game, there are no mechanical constructs here, no means of harvesting or even a constructed path toward the facilities, no crane to harvest the ‘newborns’. even the wall itself is indifferent, with many other beings birthed from pods too high up for them to survive the fall. like the mold men in the prologue, you are gestated with your back to the world, facing a deep purple-red glow that you see only occasionally throughout the rest of the game, with the majority of it in the final section.

keeping the scope of the game in mind, i think the wall is a natural occurrence, a side effect of whatever created the crater itself. it proved too difficult to exploit - no doubt it was studied extensively, obsessively even, and many resources were extracted from it, but ultimately it was too imperfect and uncontrollable for their purposes to automate. THEY being the humanoids who came to this place, i presume, because of the unique anomalies. i have the feeling something like this has been searched for endlessly for an amount of time we can't comprehend, and once it was found, there was collectively no rest until they could use it for their own ends - enlightenment through callous, purposeful cruelty. everything in this world is analogue and everything hurts because everything is disposable. it's only meat, and they are looking beyond it.

you return to the facility the prologue is set in, the path littered with corpses of those birthed from the walls who didn't make it, either killed by a now extinct predator or lost or simply too weak to make the journey. Huge red fleshy 'vines' that look to be a combination of blood vessels and slime mold flow out from the ground and even seem to be crawling their way out of the crater, which goes very, very deep. Was it naturally this deep, or did the people attempting to exploit it dig that far, trying to find the source of what causes life to endlessly birth from a wall? the surface of this world is ashen and wind swept, abandoned and left to decay. even the wall itself seems to be breaking down, patches of it exposed to the scouring wind. was this once a more vibrant, gentler world? all you really know is that an incomprehensible amount of time has passed. the facility is half-flooded with the catalysed biomass, the knobby growths inside overgrown as well, and the structure itself seems to be crumbling.

you aren't alone. as you search for a way through the facility, the parasite is observing you, thumping the trailing end of a gun against the wall in what could be anger or frustration or warning, maybe even leading you onward as it observes you. i'll digress a moment here to consider this: this world was clearly abandoned and it’s clear there have been others before you attempt to make it here, and some even do, but all fail. either the parasite has simply not woken up until the moment you arrive, or it has but found the hosts lacking and left them to die. it's clear you can't advance without it - it's an extra pair of hands, and your weapons don't work without it. whatever once powered the weapons is gone, the last remnants fused to the parasite's tail. you seem to have the same goal - to make it to the singularity - but the parasite cannot help but hurt you along the way, burrowing into you deeper and deeper the closer you are to your goal.

in any event, you have the parasite, or it has you, and you move onward, deeper into the guts of the facility. further in you see more of the red growth from outside, but it is much more alive here. infested even, with things that look like if someone tried to make a sausage from the red growths, the casing the same wormy-white as the biomass that is harvested from up above, the red splitting through it in places. this living biomass takes a few different forms, and it becomes clear that their decomposing corpses are the source of the red growths - and sometimes they aren't even dead as this process happens. the way it's positioned, the way it is tangled around everything in living chains, suggests this is not a normal state of being but an overgrowth from deeper down.

the individuals that aren't part of the chain will attack you if they see you, but most don't give chase long, and if left alone they will mind their own business, reminding me of some kind of corrupted immune system, protecting parts of itself from harm. these things do not think and have no motive other than to exist, unknowingly playing their part in the exponential expansion of biomass. some of those part of it but still 'aware' struggle even as they are half fused in the wall. to me this suggests that this is not a hive mind but some tragic corruption of one - because none of these creatures are truly aware, they do not understand why they are suffering and can take no comfort in their contribution to the whole. there is no whole to them, only themselves, and even that sense is a rudimentary one. that this area is where you acquire weapons is no coincidence, either - i see the weapons as a reaction to a flaw in whatever they've attempted to trigger at the very base of the crater. the growth is not entirely in their control, and sometimes there are accidents, and those accidents should be eliminated violently and without remorse.

the source of this biomass is no less tragic, abandoned in the pit of the crater to grow out of control, with no control over what she creates. i have no doubts she is a construct as well, some perversion of whatever was naturally occurring in the crater, and her constant growth is pulped into the biomass that is pumped from up above and continually refined until it reaches the end point. despite her miserable situation, she is passive. even when you harm her, the only violence that occurs is some distant reaction to the pain, a perversion of an immune response that causes any nearby creatures to find and attack you. she only looks at you. i spent the first half of this section nervously darting in and out of cover, certain leaving myself exposed would result in being squished flat - she has massive hands and her neck is very agile, and it's easy to imagine she could slurp you up in her massive mouth - but soon realized she only watches you. she ignores you at first, but now that she knows you are here to hurt her, she watches, anticipating the next brutal cruelty but doing nothing to stop it. her facial animations are heartbreaking, like she is trying to communicate with you but either doesn't know how or knows you won't understand. you are almost certainly made of the same substance, but she has been so mutated and malformed you might as well be aliens to one another.

while i was very sad for the mold man, this section upset me. i 'wasted' a lot of time searching for some alternative means to progress, certain there would be some choice, but there is only forward, only through, and this time it is literal. more than once i would stop out in the open or wait at a gap in the wall and stare back at her, wishing i could apologize, feeling awful. miserable. is it lonely down here? she doesn't seem to communicate with her offspring in any way, a queen who has no sway over her hive whatsoever. as soon as they are birthed, they are no longer hers. she sits in a dank hole, exposed to the harsh elements from up above. is she even aware of how far her offspring has spread? of the fact that they've breached the surface she will never see? i felt selfish at being relieved we don't witness her death (or at least excruciating pain we put her through, as she still seems partially alive as we leave) even though we cause it. her resignation - i hesitate to call it acceptance, though it may very well be that, afraid to die and to hurt but welcoming an end to her suffering - to her pain has stuck with me even days later. i’m sorry meat momma. :C

finally, though, we reach the train, and we go toward our ultimate goal - toward enlightenment. Polis, the area is called, and it is as beautiful as it is sterile, an interesting quality for a place bristling with erotic statuary. like the rest of the world, it is crumbling, disintegrating. the only sign of 'life' outside is a statue of a pregnant woman, it's belly a whorling red, not unlike the purple-red we saw in our wombwall!

entering the cathedral is almost overwhelming. there is purple matter meant to evoke brain-meat, further reinforced by the fact that the meat is either growing from or has been pulled from flayed bodies that aren't unlike my own. earlier in the game, and once more in the Mother's area, there is a clear attempt to 'refine' the beings that emerge from the wall, grown indoors and in pods that glow red and are filled with reddish amniotic fluid. the beings are smoother, with less exposed innards, but the only one we really see dies moments after it is 'born'. what was clear to me is that this is ultimately what this class of people are used for, as everything in this world has a use. no waste. we are tools for ascension, for the ultimate masters of this place to transcend their flesh. this entire society is based on powering this room, on creating a singularity that is just beyond a wall that is some kind of living art. you can only see hints of it when you first enter, but when you are finally able to see it in full it speaks to me as a final expression of a society that sees flesh only as a means to an end. the majesty of the room is also the most flagrant display of cruelty as it is purposeful instead of a thoughtless means to an end. it is terrible and beautiful. in a world where every strip of meat has a purpose, there is this one instance where it is used purely for decoration.

there are two massive sculpture reliefs as well, detailing what seems like the journey of this civilization toward enlightenment. many things reproduce or are forcibly made in this world, but the cathedral is overflowing with explicit sexual acts - they are trying to give birth to themselves not as physical things, but as something that has no use for meat. meat is disgusting, disposable, but it has its uses. over an oppressive length of time they have used it, manipulated it - and themselves - until they were finally able to rebirth themselves as something pure. all the sexual & pregnant depictions are to me a way to glorify what they are doing, elevating everything they have done below and far from this cathedral as something holy instead of as something abhorrent and monstrous. why else is it so far removed? why is only biological element here a single, beautifully made wall? it is a beautiful lie that they have built their transcendence on. all the sexual imagery is lurid artifice.

i will digress again to express who i think ‘They’ are. they are us, the player - they are human beings. very far in the future, but still us, and our penchant for cruelty has only been more refined. a comforting fanfiction i have told myself is that this was only a small cult of humanity, a sect that has broken away or been banished and left to carry out their goals isolated from the rest of humanity. i like to imagine they are immortals who have stopped reproducing, have grown tired of every pursuit of the flesh and even of the mind, and now believe they have earned their godhood. all they have to do is shed their fleshy - biomechanical at this stage, no doubt! - shells and take it.

accessing this area is difficult - many things culminate at once. you must torture strange little fetuses by fighting them to the death. it becomes clear that suffering is a key ingredient to ascension, and though it seems frustrating and pointless in the moment, it makes sense in the end as you crush up their mangled little bodies and extract red-purple essence from them. never as purple as you saw in the wombwall, but as close as they were able to manufacture since they never did find a way to extract it directly. this essence - a catalyst no doubt, not unlike the first interaction of biomass & catalyst you encounter! - activates two strange automatons whose third eye - the only eye they have! - bursts forth. they are pregnant with red fluid, but nothing seems to grow inside. curiously, the flesh of their back is exposed, showing off what looks like a very stripped down version of the parasite that infests you, a skull peering out instead of a face. another use for the otherwise uncontrolled growths from the wall.

your parasite, the mutant one, one that has not been meticulously designed as illustrated in the reliefs, has almost completely overtaken you. it does not want you to proceed even though it is the only reason you've gotten so far. it steals the last canister you need and renders your hands useless, fusing the final weapon you acquire into one and tangling the fingers of the other. you cannot interact with anything now - but it seems this is not an uncommon problem for those seeking ascension. there are machines throughout that shred and grind the parasite away, albeit temporarily, and through this process you are able to find a machine designed to extract said parasite. though it can probably be inferred earlier, this just confirms that it is not 'you' on the menu screen, but the parasite. it makes a last ditch effort to stop you, to kill you, but it is successfully extracted. it also quickly escapes, leaving you to limp your way, weak and defenceless and totally alone, through the ruins of the cathedral and return to perform your final rites. both automatons are activated and you splay yourself out on a machine that flays you, removes the top of your skull, and connects you to the vast consciousness that has been dormant since, presumably, the last of the people who built this place left. it did give me pause, though - all the other displayed bodies are like me. we exist only as tools to this end. do i have any hope of ascending? it's clear i've been driven to do it, and perhaps so have the many others birthed from the wall before me, but will i even be allowed?

of course pain & cruelty is part of it. once we are connected to the mass consciousness, suddenly i am no longer in my body & in one of the automatons instead. they do not flinch, bleed or feel pain when acquiring a key. they have strong bodies but despite their pregnant form, they are essentially empty without my consciousness, left prone, just as abandoned as everyone and everything else. one opens the elegant meat door while the other plucks me up... but not without affixing one of the cutting instruments to its shoulder. i carry myself through the door, being cut the entire time, and head toward a set of stairs framed by statues that are slowly disintegrating into a singularity, revealing the tender red meat underneath. no matter how clean anything is here, how armored, there is always soft, vulnerable flesh beneath.

we are too far from the group consciousness’s signal range and the automaton stops so close to the goal, so close to being free of the constant cruelty and pain, and the parasite returns. it rips us from the arms of the automaton and though we reach for it, desperate for it to help - after all its task is clearly to help others into the singularity! - it stands there passively. empty.

we could both go, in this moment. the way is open, wide open. in fact, we might even help each other through, but the parasite will not go and perhaps has never wanted to. perhaps it knows it can't, knows that though something similar to what it is has been used to aid in the ascendance of others, those too were disposable meat. whatever it's reasoning, there is a final cruelty in what it does as the both of you become a knobby knot of flesh that can do nothing but grow and suffer, forever basking in the glow of what might have been salvation. it's made more awful by the fact that you can't really know what's on the other side - maybe it's worse, there. you'll never find out. the choice has been made for you - stay and live. stay and suffer.

SCORN is a noun: a feeling and expression of contempt or disdain for someone or something.

the entire world has contempt for you, and that is all you will feel until the world around the singularity erodes and you disintegrate along with it. 'what did you think would happen?' seems to be implied by the end. you spend the entire game mashing things up, shooting them, twisting them, being twisted yourself... all for this? for a thing you don't even fully understand? following a path laid down by people who were so desperate to escape the cruelty of flesh that they enacted the most brutal cruelties they could imagine, covering it up in their cathedral with erotic imagery and beautiful artworks. is the endless pursuit of ascension worth it, if all that is the cost?