Scarred is a cautionary tale. It was rushed to release before it was ready, and as a result, it’s riddled with bugs and weird mechanical decisions. There’s nothing here that a few more rounds of playtesting couldn’t have sorted out, and the publisher has offered an apology and said that they’re working on fixes. For right now, it’s an ambitious mess.
Ordinarily, that would mean that I put it aside for now and focus on something else, but Scarred was already my emergency fallback pick for this week’s column. It’s been a weird few days, even before roughly a third of the remaining American games media got torched for the insurance money.
Anyway, it’s a shame that Scarred shipped in a broken state, as I wanted to like it more than I did. It’s a short, cheap horror game set in modern-day Singapore, with no real gore, lots of atmosphere, and the occasional big jump scare. It’s the sort of thing you’d pick up if you wanted to kill an evening or a weekend.
Alan Wong is a high school student and basketball player who’s trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. Then his friend Olivia suddenly disappears.
Alan subsequently wakes up outside Olivia’s apartment building in the dead of night with no idea how he got there. When he enters, he discovers the building is now haunted by old memories and new ghosts, many of which involve the parts of Olivia’s life that he never saw.
For the first 20 minutes, Scarred comes off like it’s going to be one of those weakly interactive adventure games that people like to call “walking simulators.” All you really do is walk around and click on things.
Thankfully, that’s just the prologue. Once you hit the first chapter, Scarred opens up its map, adds several puzzles, and gets a little less linear. As you explore Olivia’s building, you collect coins that you can use to unlock access to other floors, which also steadily makes the building more dangerous. Your only means of defense is Alan’s basketball, which you can use to stun some enemies, throw switches, knock over distant objects, or dispel the occasional inconvenient ghost.
By Scarred’s halfway point, it’s evolved from a low-stakes adventure game into something more like PG-rated survival horror. However, that halfway point is also when its cracks start to show.
I was initially inclined to cut Scarred a lot of slack, as it was created by a solo developer, and the first couple of hours are genuinely interesting. Its core mysteries are revealed at a careful pace, it’s got a handful of decent puzzles, and the building itself slowly shifts from a generic apartment building to something creepier and more evocative. I particularly liked the chance to check out some Singaporean horror, since I don’t have much experience with that.
However, the further I got into it, the less sure I was that it had ever been playtested at all. I’ve never run into any of the progress-halting bugs that I’ve seen reported on Scarred’s Steam forum, but I’ve hit several different issues where its mechanics were either flawed or so bad I thought they’d glitched out.
The first boss is a particular low point, which removes your control of your character until a specific, unlabeled split-second window, then kills you if you don’t immediately run away. I’ve also had a consistent issue with enemies placed around blind corners, so it’s impossible to react to them before they kill you, and there’s a forced stealth sequence in the third chapter that’s truly a slog to get through. You can get to the end of Scarred in its current state, but I can’t imagine you’d enjoy the process.
Scarred is one of several indie games I’ve played in the last few years that feel like they got scooped up by a new publisher, then kicked out the door before they were ready for wide release. The only big difference here, as noted above, is that the publisher apologized this time.
There’s nothing wrong with Scarred that couldn’t have been addressed with more testing. The ideas are solid, and there are some genuine storytelling chops on display, but the implementation isn’t there. My plan for the moment is to give Scarred a couple more weeks, then revisit it and hope the developer can pull out a win.
[Scarred, developed by KOEX Studio and published by the Iterative Collective, is now available for PC via Steam for $7.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by an Iterative Collective PR representative.]
