It’s a genre famous for its tropes, horror can also be deeply personal. For Ebb Software, the Serbian nightmare-smiths behind the forthcoming Scorn, effective horror is all about giving the player time for reflection. “While you’re in the middle of a horrific event your fears are purely instinctual,” says studio manager Miloš Hetlerović. “Reflecting on them later or experiencing them secondhand is where the psychological side of horror comes in. You can’t escape from your own mind as you can from a monster.”
Set in a lysergic, unsettling world of “odd forms and sombre tapestry,” Scorn’s striking visual direction takes cues from both Alien progenitor HR Giger and Polish surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński, Hetlerović tells me – as well as the films of Cronenberg, Argento, Lynch, Carpenter and Jodorowsky, and the fiction of Lovecraft, Barker, Ligotti, JG Ballard, and Stanisław Lem. Like all good biomechanical art, gazing into Scorn’s world imparts the sense of a place composed of familiar motifs – our own bodies, and the synthetic extensions we willingly construct – but fused and skewed to impart dissociative dread. “Fans of classic survival horror should feel right at home with Scorn,” says Hetlerović, although homeliness itself shouldn’t be expected. The reassuring oasis of a Resident Evil safe room seems unlikely here; Scorn aims to isolate, confuse and trap the player in a world that actively spurns their attempts to understand it.
