On your first playthrough, you may be on your guard, waiting until you hit the trigger which morphs the experience into a full-blown horror, but Scanner only adopts horror techniques up to the point of setting the foreboding, uncomfortable atmosphere of a cave. It's a cross between The Unfinished Swan and Radiohead's House of Cards video, and true to the experience of hiking through a cavern, Scanner Sombre is a half-and-half blend of creepy and beautiful. Scanner Sombre beckons you on through a pitch-black cave, one that you can only see the walls and floors of by shooting coloured dots onto them. There is no one to dehumanise as it's a mostly solitary affair, and it doesn't have you mastering complex systems it has you exploring. Your window into its world involves no bird's eye views or computer interfaces only a digital spray can. They're laser-focused, open-ended strategy sims which have you dehumanising other people by taking control of them, their possessions, or their fate through synthetic systems.
Introversion Software are known for their highly formal simulators like DEFCON, Uplink, and Prison Architect.
Soon I was drifting down a tranquil river to some prog rock, and I barely saw another one of those monsters again. It was going to be one of those disempowerment horrors where I'd grip my controller, sweaty-palmed, dodging and dashing my way around ghouls. At that moment, I thought I knew what kind of game Scanner Sombre was going to be. Once I got within seeing-distance of it, it came hurtling towards me and killed me in seconds. I found the source of the noise in the corner of the chamber: it was some coloured mist in the shape of a human. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a sale or a bundle.Note: This article contains major spoilers for Scanner Sombre.Ī little way into Scanner Sombre, I swam out into a chest-high pool, and my splashing caused something in the cave to respond with a banshee-like wail. 99 is worth to one, must decide everyone for itself. Whether a play time of approximately 3 hours 9. Even less would be a pity and more could have become monotonous in the long run. The playing time is appropriate and I don't think it should have been much longer. The sounds and the music also fit well into the overall concept. Everything is so simple and colourful and yet the game manages to create a constriction in confined spaces and tunnels and a depressing loneliness in the wide caves and caverns. After almost 3 hours I finished the game and can say:- The story is quite thin- Horror it's also not- The content consists of walking and scanning- It's very straightforward and if you scan everything well, you can't get lostThe list sounds quite negative, but now comes the great BUT! the atmosphere that is conveyed here is really great. In the end, I decided to give the game a chance. I found the screenshots very colorful and the description was also not very tempting. I wasn't sure if this was really a game I could enjoy. I received Scanner Sombre from a bundle and left it lying around for a long time.