Unlike a conventional walking sim, a room doesn't reveal itself to us all at once as an image when we turn on a light switch, instead we have to touch every object with our scanner. Water eludes us and movement can only appear as a fleeting instance. We can only mark and note the presence of a hard surface. The player can only speculate on the blood-stained graffiti that goes unseen. Beds and torture devices are made of the same visual stuff, and read as equally banal and concrete. In sensing the world we paint over it.Ĭolour in this world is a spectrum that only connotes proximity - living, dead, ghostly and physical everything is effectively monochrome. The player seems to be living in a virtual world behind which lies the real thing. As an expanding sphere of laser-lines, they make all surfaces appear concave from a fixed point until we move around and build up a stereoscopic frame of reference, as if we are painting a tromp l'oiel onto the cave walls. when we initiate a 360 scan around ourselves, the striated rows of lasers cover a lot of ground, but they toy with our sense of space. However, these affordances cannot sate the player's inner sceptic, and cannot live up to the naturalism implied by the game's subtle soundscape. The game feigns transparency at first, and indeed offers extensions to your sensorium as well as restrictions - you can see through walls to areas you have already scanned, and you later unlock the ability to scan in sweeps and distinguish metal from rock. You don't know what you're missing in Scanner Sombre, and you don't know what you can rely on from what remains. Sensing an environment is piecemeal, cumulative, and comes with the potential for obsolescence, where a statue may move since you last scanned it, leaving a hollow shell indistinguishable from the rest of your scanned topography. The player must constantly judge whether they 'know' what lies before them, what level of information is enough, what level is excessive, and whether these dots tell them more about the scanned or the scanner. The simplicity of the scanning process itself belies a conceptual complexity. Story is a scaffolding for ideas. Like the fit-for purpose UI and the rigid scanning device in our hand, all aspects of this game are practical and unobtrusive in the service of directing our attention to the process of scanning itself.
#Statue scanner sombre serial
The core takeaway here is that this environment is one of serial loss, a land of traces and metonyms then and now, footsteps and scans and statues and mannequins. This place was home to ancient cults, early-modern witch-hunters and industrial mining accidents. At a (literal) textual level, the narrative of Scanner Sombre is a kind of melancholy diary we've seen before, stringing together disparate clichés, but it serves as an index of time - both relative to the player character and the iterative tragedies of this cave system. True, there is a narrative here, but it acts as a hook for larger questions about being and knowing in a cave filled with digital ghosts. A short and incisive low-challenge experience, it joins indie titles such as Unfinished Swan in presenting something akin to a walking sim, but with a focus on providing meaning through experimental mechanics rather than environmental story-telling.