I adore indie horror games, and oftentimes my love for this genre leads me to some hidden gems, beautifully crafted passion projects that outshine some of the latest AAA releases despite limitations in technology, finances and hands on deck. Other times though, I’ve bore witness to some stinkers. Scarred, by solo Singaporean developer, Choo Bin Yong (KOEX studio), is unfortunately the latter of these.
Scarred opens in a school in Singapore, where, as high school student Calvin, we traverse its corridors, corrupted by the spirit of his missing classmate, Olivia. After uncovering a scene where Calvin films someone inside one of the stalls of the girl’s bathroom, we cut to Alan, who was seemingly close friends with Olivia. As Alan, we continue to be guided through this hellish landscape, uncovering the truth behind her disappearance… which you can probably piece together without having to actually play the game because, yes, it’s the most obvious storyline.
And while there were some elements to Olivia’s story that did surprise me a little, none of it made up for the six hour playtime I sat through where, hours after I had pretty much understood what had happened, the point was still continuously driven into me laboriously. Scarred also has one of my least favorite cliches where a story tries to have you initially believe that the main character is somehow responsible for something that has gone wrong in the past, yet as the secrets are uncovered, you discover that their involvement is actually not their fault at all and they are simply haunted by a guilty conscious out of grief. Either write a flawed character or don’t.
Scarred is the worst example of narrative walking sims that focus on psychological topics. It has you walking down corridor after corridor, sit through elongated, terribly animated cutscenes and solve stupid puzzles that make no sense but the developer probably thought they were being really metaphorical and clever about. Olivia wanted to be a hairdresser and loved playing basket ball, so of course scissors, hair and basket balls are going to be a running theme in the level design.
But Scarred isn’t just a walking sim; it does another trope that I find infuriating by trying to bring in different genres in an attempt to offer up an attempt at gameplay, rather than sticking to the genre it started with. What I expected from Scarred was a narrative experience, mostly akin to a walking sim, with some puzzle solving elements. What I got was that, plus a ridiculous basket ball throwing mechanic to fight “enemies” off with and hit certain objects to make them move or turn on, one of the worst platforming sections I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing, and – Bloober Team loves these – chase sequences!
But even this isn’t Scarred’s biggest flaw; I was bored. Bored. In a horror game! The storyline was just excruciatingly dull, dragging over its point over and over again. There are games with ten times as much depth as this which are a third of the length. Its “scary” moments mostly consisted of predictable jump scares – which completely defeats the point of jump scares – and the occasional environment noise when the developer remembered that these also contribute to building tension.
Most of the gameplay in Scarred consists of moving through corridors, solving a sparse amount of puzzles, but most of all, not knowing where the hell you need to go next. This will be either because there’s no objective to check so you have to keep playing around with things until you work out what metaphorical action the game wants you to do, or you can’t bloody see anything because the game is so dark – with no brightness settings or flashlight to help!
The majority of Scarred’s environments are as uninteresting as its storyline. Most of them are abandoned corridors, which look the same as a lot of indie horror games churned out from the Unreal Engine. As well as being ridiculously dark to the point where you can’t see where you’re going half the time, some of them also have this overly washed out grey look which make it just as hard to see as the darkness. The cutscenes are hideous, poorly animated and overused considering the poor quality of them, which can likely be attributed to it being a low budget project, but also if that’s a problem then just stop using them. What’s worse is that many of the cutscenes are pointless, simply showing the player character walking around the room with a blank expression or another snapshot of the ghost doing something random for “scare” factor.
The audio certainly doesn’t help as there’s either no music backing any of the scenes, making the cutscenes incredibly awkward to watch, or it feels largely out of place. There’s a soft piano track that does match some scenes, but a lot of them just sound like a culmination of electronic, alien-like noises which don’t suit the game at all. Most of the sound effects are horrendous quality too, with choppy editing and the audio levels being all over the place. To make matters worse, some of them are very repetitive, which got extremely annoying by hour six. There was also this strange humming noise sounding through most of the levels in the background which also grew quickly irritating, especially when trying to solve puzzles.
The voice acting was another let down in Scarred’s audio. The developer hired local talent to undertake the performances for “authenticity”, but unfortunately because English isn’t the first language of these actors, the performances are really wooden with many sentences being awkwardly phrased. There’s no option to play the game in its native language either, which would have really helped with immersion and would have been much preferred.
If I was to say one nice thing about Scarred, then it would be that the projector level was actually quite creative, having you move around projectors to unveil clues to the level’s puzzle. This was also the only visually interesting part of Scarred too. Other than that, it was an absolute misery to play and I wouldn’t recommend it to even the most devoted horror game fans.
Jess played Scarred on PC with a provided review copy.
