When I first put my hand into the slimy interface on the meat wall and felt that my bones were wrapped in some kind of warm squirming and recalibrated in shape, I understood the rule here: all interaction is based on the cost of flesh and blood. There is no text guidance, no interface prompt, only the pipes pulsating like the intestines, and the machine makes a wet and heavy breathing sound, and I, an unknown existence, must use my body to interpret, embed and become a part of the system in a huge maze composed of bones, tendons and unknown biological membranes. _Scorn_ presents not a explored world, but a living organ complex that is digesting me.

The aesthetics of the game is pure “biomechanical” style. The wall is made of huge ribs and layers of calcified plates, the door is a contracted sphincter, the elevator is a vertical spine, and the weapon is a living tool made of parasitic organisms and chitin shells. Every step is accompanied by sticky sound effects and visual physiological discomfort. The puzzle design here completely follows its strange internal logic: to open a door, I may need to first operate a console composed of a nerve bundle and a pump to inject body fluids of a specific color into the circulation system; to get a tool, I may need to implant embryonic life into the incubation bag on the wall and wait for it. Mature and tear off. There is no humanistic metaphor in the process of solving the puzzle. It is a set of cold, accurate and extremely cruel physiological operation manuals.

In this world without lines and story text, the narrative is completely composed of the physiological encounters of the environment and the player. I walked through the corridor, and in the niches on both sides were countless human-like bodies embedded in the device and still twitching slightly — they may be workers, fuels, and failed works. I operate a huge “manufacturing machine”, which twists and forges a living body, and finally produces a key, and the silent spasm of the living body in the process becomes my only and disgusting annotation of the ethics of this world. I am an intruder, but it is more like a foreign body handled by the excretory system or immune mechanism of this factory. Pain is not punishment, but the most basic way of communication and resource currency here.

As I advanced, I walked through the gestation room, slaughterhouse, and temple-like purification facilities, and gradually pieced together the outline of a civilization: a civilization that developed biotechnology to the extreme, but completely erased the individual consciousness and spiritual dimension, and finally objectified itself into a huge flesh and blood machine. Its “failure” is not destruction, but falling into a state of eternal self-circulation and unconscious physiological existence. There is no thought, no purpose, only the operation of organs, the circulation of body fluids and the growth and decay of structures. Every step I take to “solve the puzzle” is just to activate or restart a partially failed function of this huge organism. I’m not exploring the ruins, I’m doing a futile electric shock for a huge corpse.

There is no redemption or revelation at the end of the game. After countless flesh and blood grafting and instrumental death, I reached a certain core. There is no final BOSS, only one choice, or one choice: merge with a larger and older biomass structure and become a new and insignificant node in this eternal cycle; or completely disintegrate in stripping and return to nothingness. Either way, it has nothing to do with victory or defeat, just a calm metabolism of this system.

Withdrawing from _Scorn_, the lines of the real world are extremely clear and cold. What it leaves me is not fear, but a deep physiological fatigue and existential chill. It strips off the coat and the decoration of meaning of all civilizations, and restores life to the most primitive organs, pipes and painful stimulus responses. It is a disturbing mirror, reflecting the ultimate nightmare that civilization may slide into when technology completely engulfs spirituality and efficiency becomes the only purpose: an extremely sophisticated, self-sustaining, but living grave without any “why” to answer.