Scorn Beginner’s Guide: Ultimate Tips & Tricks

by Mike Alexander / Game Guides, Tips & Tricks / 21 Aug 2023

Get ready to explore an ancient, biomechanical nightmare in Scorn. After nearly a decade of development and delays, the game is finally in players’ hands, and it is every bit as gross and slimy as the early trailers would have led you to believe.

In addition to being stomach-turningly upsetting, Scorn is actually quite a surprisingly challenging game. In place of the all-out action most other games present, Scorn chooses to have an entirely silent experience with no dialogue to hold your hand or convey the story to you.

No, like the protagonist of the game, you’re on your own to figure out where you are and what needs to be done. Can you do it? Maybe, but with an outside helping hand, your Scorn playthrough will go much more smoothly. So, if you picked up Scorn and are having some difficulty navigating the maze of flesh and bone, then join us as we go over some ways to survive successfully in this Scorn Beginner’s Guide.

Hanging Horrors

From early on in the game, you will encounter threats that hang from high surfaces like ceilings and hurl buckets of acid at you. The protagonist of Scorn doesn’t move very quickly, so you’ll need to keep your eyes peeled and be ready to react to these monsters before you are even in range.

Another thing to note, you should be using your melee weapon to dispatch these threats. Two melee attacks will destroy them, and there isn’t too much issue getting close enough to them to use it. You could use your other weapons, but ammo is very limited, and better saved for other monsters who pose a bigger threat.

Bull Fighter

When the “bull”-type enemies are introduced, don’t be afraid. Yes, they look nothing like bulls and instead look more like the translucent-skinned nightmare creatures of your worst dreams, but there is a simple way to get rid of them without getting into a heated fight.

Around the same time as the bulls are introduced, you will obtain a shotgun-style attachment for your weapon base. It only has three ammo channels, but that’s fine if you’re using it properly. When a bull is close enough to you that it will suffer the full blast of that shotgun, pull the trigger twice and you’re done. The bull will be downed and you can move along safely without having wasted too much of your ammo.

Use the Environment

Scorn is obviously not a cover shooter where you have a dedicated button to hug a wall and aim around it to prevent taking damage, but you can use your surroundings when you’re dealing with a few enemies. Your weapons are fairly slow to fire and reload, but the majority of the enemies are just as slow, and you can move around bone pillars and through obstacles around you to confuse them and give you some time to take aim and fire.

You won’t always have a situation where you have plenty of environmental features to use in your favor, but when they are there, you should make the most of them. Avoiding taking damage is going to be a big part of Scorn, almost as big as conserving ammo. Just remember to take note of the areas you visit in case you find yourself in a one-on-three battle.

Be Prepared for Puzzles

In a turn of events that surprised a few people on launch day, Scorn is more of a Myst-style puzzle game than it is a survival horror game. That means that, while there is a fair bit of combat and weapon types to enjoy, you will spend the majority of your time walking through locations and solving a variety of puzzles in order to move on to the next area.

If that’s not the kind of game you enjoy, that’s ok! There is still plenty to enjoy about Scorn even if you just walk around to take in all of the visuals that Ebb Software built over the decade-long development cycle. As long as you aren’t easily grossed out, because Scorn is VERY upsetting to look at most of the time.

Conclusion

There you go, Scorn fans! We hope these tips and tricks help you along in your initial experience with Scorn. There’s much, much more to see and experience, and it is important that you take your time to fully go through everything the game has to offer. Just be sure to have a bucket nearby for when the visuals get to be too much for your stomach!

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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