Scorn

After god knows how long, Scorn has finally been released and my god is it horrific. Stuck in a nightmarish bio-mechanical world, you will walk through experiencing this unsettling environment. With different skillsets, weapons, and various items to collect, you will make your way through interconnected regions in an open-ended world in a non-linear fashion. No cutscenes in this game either, the story is told through the environment and the puzzles you encounter. On top of that, there is no hand-holding in this game, so miss something, and you may be out of luck.

While Scorn's gameplay is...definitely something else (I did get lost so many times), the game itself actually runs really well on the Steam Deck. This came as a huge surprise since the developers noted that the game would not support the Steam Deck. I would say that makes this incredibly lucky to have a game that isn't supposed to support the Steam Deck...actually support it!

With max settings, you can expect a 24W battery drain with a framerate of 47. This is actually pretty great, and you could hit 60 FPS fairly easily, though there are some framerate spikes regardless. To mitigate this, I elected to go for a 40 FPS limit so the drops weren't jarring. Scorn also has FSR 2.0 integration, which I can't praise enough! Because of that, we are able to get the game down to a 15W drain at a stable 40 FPS while still looking absolutely horrific at medium quality settings (in a good way).

I did encounter one weird issue so far though. When I was changing settings, my screen went completely black. I wasn't sure what happened, as I was changing from high quality to medium, so I put my Deck to sleep and turned it back on. The game came back like nothing was wrong and everything was fine. I would also recommend turning up the camera sensitivity as I feel turning is a little slow, but that is up to you! Overall, Scorn is a really competent performing game on the Steam Deck and I am overjoyed by it.

Screenshots

Comparisons:

Honestly, looking at both of these, there isn't much change to see. This is probably due to the darker atmosphere of the game, which can mask any flaws that may be coming out. Overall, it still looks amazing!

Stills:

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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