Nightmare Fuel / Scorn

This is a game based off of the paintings of HR Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. What did you expect? When each of the trailers has their own heading, that's not a good sign.

Trailers

Pre-Alpha

And I Must Scream doesn't even begin to describe it.

• The aesthetic of the trailer is quite a sight. It just looks wrong. Sick, even. The fact that there are supposedly people stuck in pods while still aware doesn't help.

Teaser

Oh, hello! How are you doing?

• The game's reworking and higher budget are made apparent in this trailer. What happens is essentially the same as the pre-alpha trailer, with long shots, droning noises, and a gameplay sneak peek. However, unlike the pre-alpha, the environments here are perfectly lit, allowing us to look at every visceral detail. The noises are more metallic and sound more like breathing. And it doesn't help that even without the noises, almost every single shot in the trailer is utterly dripping with Nightmare Fuel.
• We're introduced to this redesigned world with a shot of a series of phallus-looking structures jutting out from the fleshy hills.
• Following that, on our nice little tour of this world, we see some sort of inhuman entity trapped in some sort of pod filled with red fluid (And possibly still conscious)
• If that's not enough, then the camera repeatedly lingers on a Humanoid Abomination with glazed-over eyes and no mouth, stuck in a wall.

Xbox Trailer

• After a long while, Scorn is back, and with an even higher budget. Oh goody. This trailer easily surpasses the other two in the Surreal Horror, And I Must Scream elements, and atmosphere.
• For the first time, we get to see another (Supposedly) sentient being besides the protagonist, with the appearance of some sort of creature that's apparently trapped in a robot-like structure and fully aware of it.
• The aesthetic has undergone a minor change. Everything has a cold, dead look to it now. Extremely pale bio mechanical structures overgrown with Meat Moss.

Summer of Gaming

• First off, Doug Bradley's narration juxtaposed with the visceral visuals makes it abundantly clear that something has gone horribly wrong with this world.
• A shot near the end of the trailer has us treated to some sort of disgusting thing many times larger than you are, resembling a gigantic humanoid head attached to a long, fleshy, serpent-like neck, save for the mouth - that is replaced by a visibly pulsating tube-like structure.

The Game

• The entire world can be considered nightmare fuel from beginning to end. The unique art style of everything evokes an unsettling feeling no matter where you go.
• The very first shot of the game we see is of our protagonist, and already Ebb Software shows that the trailers weren't playing around - from this alone, we know that they have a strange, shell-like structure seemingly fused to the back of their neck and head, and unlike other depictions of the character, they do have a mouth - but no lips, displaying a mouthful of teeth to the elements.
• The revelation of how we get to the beginning of the game - the protagonist wakes up, half-fused to the floor and held in place by strange tendrils. This is interspersed with flashback shots of them crawling their way across the surface of Scorn's world, making their way to a mysterious tower in the distance. Suddenly, the ground beneath them gives way, and they fall down, down, down into the underbelly.
• The entire prologue is a How We Got Here of how the protagonist ended up in the floor, and it's not pretty.
  • The first major thing that happens after they wake up after falling down from the surface is them getting a strange key suddenly grafted to their hands, and it is not a painless process, as evidenced by the protagonist desperately trying and failing to yank their hand out of the grafting machine.
  • Remember the thing crammed into a ball in the trailers? That's the first living thing you see in this game. It's a humanoid creature crammed into a pod that you "meet" by using a machine to "pluck" it off a wall that has many, MANY, similar pods that are inactive or broken.
  • In order to allow the cranes scattered around to grab the pod, you have to put holes into the pod. When you do, a machine extends from the ceiling and begins drilling into it - which reveals that the creature isn't crammed into the pod - the pod is very literally part of the creature, with you only finding out when it starts screaming in agony when the holes are being drilled.
  • There's a door that requires two people to open. You open it by getting a key onto the creature's arm, with two ways of doing it. Neither of them are particularly pretty, and could be considered a Sadistic Choice.
    • The first option you have is to free the creature from the pod. This involves taking it into a room and placing it on a pedestal underneath a sawblade. Upon activation, the sawblade cuts open the pod, causing the creature to scream again. By the way, it has no mouth, its head is fused to its shoulder, and it can barely stand on its own two legs. After getting the key on it and opening the door, you just leave it attached to the mechanism to open the door, meaning that while you get on the elevator beyond the doors and go upwards, it's forever trapped in the depths.
    • The other choice you have is to kill it. This involves a different mechanism that resembles a scoop. This one tears the creature from the pod, crushing it in the process, and then dumps its corpse into a nearby hole. The only thing left behind is its arm, which you use to open the door.
• The parasite is just completely unnerving from start to finish. When you first encounter it, you only get glimpses of the lizard-like creature as it is shown to stalk you through the area of the prologue. Then it latches onto you, tears into your stomach, and continues to stay on you for most of the game, forcing a very flimsy and uneasy truce between yourself and the parasite trying to eat you. Later on, horrific growths and tendrils spread over your entire body. It gets to the point that it completely covers both your hands and you have to repeatedly expose your left hand to a horrific contraption that tears the tendrils off bloodily just to get anything done.
• The giant creature shown in the trailer is seen later on in the game, and it is terrifying in its sheer size. The worst part is that you have to mutilate and eventually kill the creature to progress, and you'd think that at some point it would attack you. What makes it more disturbing is that it doesn't, it just stares right at you as you continue to tear holes in its body. And it isn't a death glare or an evil eye either, no, it is a silent plea, and it seems like it is begging you to not kill it.
• The penultimate puzzle involves squeezing three homunculi (which look like small blood soaked misshapen humanoids) in a juicer-like machine so it can be used to power the humanoid robot that will assist the protagonists, one by one. You discover that the last two of the three are still alive, as they flash glowing eyes while controlling the harvester mech to fight you back, and you have to fight it.
• What happens to both the parasite and the protagonist at the end. They fuse into some grotesque hybrid of the two at the gate, frozen forever as a horrific statue, likely mere moments away from possible salvation. And I Must Scream doesn't even begin to describe it.
• If the Parasite really is just the Prologue guy mutated by the unknown liquid, then it's very possible that its drive to merge with/cocoon Scorn Guy doesn't even have a biological purpose. So its torment of Scorn Guy was absolutely pointless.

Misc

• This game's soundtrack is immensely unsettling. One of the tracks sounds like a rapid heartbeat, with brief synthetic drones in between. It is just as terrifying as it sounds.

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