Unfortunately these moments of unease and terror Scanner Sombre is trying to achieve often fall a bit flat. The glitches in your headset also provide some interesting story beats, whereby you are never too sure what’s real and what isn’t. Your imagination will go wild as you slowly unveil a statue or an alter from the darkness. It’s undeniable Scanner Sombre has a distinctive style, the neon visuals and the occasional glitches in the video compression provide an experience that only games can offer. Once or twice I was too preoccupied with playing I completely missed these, considering there is no voice acting, however I never missed too much to spoil my experience. Additionally small snippets of storyline are fed to you in the form of short paragraphs as you progress. These upgrades have little effect to the simplistic gameplay, but it provides excellent pacing between areas. The further you press on, you will acquire some minor upgrades to your scanner. This also solves two major issues with walking simulators and exploration games in general walking rarely gets tiresome since you are always occupied and it’s nearly impossible to get lost as you leave a trail of laser-crumbs behind you. Scanning the surroundings and gradually increasing the resolution has a similar satisfaction to cleaning a dirty car. It genuinely feels like you’re carving the environment around you, never too sure what might be around the corner. Pressing the left mouse button sends out a barrage of lasers, and for each laser-beam that hits a surface it gets plotted on your head-mounted display. The whole game is technically played in pitch darkness, but with LIDAR scanner in-hand you will gradually plot the entire system of caves. While remaining very linear Scanner Sombre gives you the grand illusion you are exploring a forgotten system of caves. Watching someone play it on YouTube would offer a very similar experience to playing it yourself, sure, there were a few random events, but it was almost a movie. The major problem with Dear Esther was that it didn’t take advantage of the genre. As a result I can assure you this review won’t contain any story spoilers. For the most part Scanner Sombre does exactly this, and it does it with a flourish. Walking simulators are about soaking in the atmosphere, analysing the story and coming away with a new experience. Fortunately with proceeding titles such as Gone Home, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Her Story, using dollar to time as a metric for this genre is quickly becoming obsolete. Understandably too, many people felt ripped off when Dear Esther offered an experience less than 90 minutes long for the same price of a huge game like Terraria.
The often short and tight nature of this beast often provides an avenue for increased scrutiny.
As a self proclaimed enthusiast of walking simulators, it’s still easy to admit the genre has a few shortcomings.
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