Scanner Sombre: Alone in the Dark, Surveying

"Technical glitch", my ass, There's clearly a ghost T-posing on you man.

Scanner Sombre is a game that I avoided playing for a long time, mostly due to the fact that I thought that it was a VR title, but it's not. It's actually a walking simulator, and a pretty short one at that, clocking in about two to two and a half hours for a first time playthrough. Ordinarily I would have felt somewhat cheated, but I got it off a humble bundle and for what it does, it's a decent experience that is closer to an art piece than a game.

There isn't much of a story to Scanner Sombre, keeping with the short game length. Essentially you wake up alone, in the dark, in the dark recesses of the earth. You were on an excursion to survey the caves as part of your apparent obsession with the history of this particular cave. A problem quickly presents itself, and that is that you have no way of lighting up the cave, so you're effectively blind. The solution to this nightmare scenario is an AR headset and scanning tool, which use blips of light to mark your surroundings (You did come here to survey after all).  There's an element of a guided tour to it and the main character's text-delivered internal monologue is does add a further element of strangeness to it, but where the suspense comes through is the few apparitions that show themselves throughout the game. However, besides that there isn't really much progression or differentiation in the story of Scanner Sombre at the end of the day as opposed to other games of its kind besides its short length and setting.

The best technical moments of the game are whenever you're in a watery environment, it's quite breathtaking.

Technically, this game was actually pretty interesting to play, with a dark and eerie soundtrack (that comes free with the game), and a unique visual style that set it apart from pretty much every other game. The method in which you 'see' the environment around you is through scanning your surroundings in first person with a laser-surveyor. However, you also control the detail of your scanned surroundings, if you scan an object longer, or with a tighter focus (or a burst scan), you'll get a sharper and more crisp idea of what exactly you're looking at. Shadows also occur here, because you can't very well scan something with another thing obstructing it. It's very possible to miss quite a bit if you rush, and while it's initially a very disorienting view, you'll get used to it within minutes (and you can always go back and look at your progress on the map). The cave ambiance is also pretty good, and people who aren't fans of caves will most certainly not have the best time with this, I sure as hell didn't with how jumpy it made me. Despite the unique technical style of Scanner Sombre, I really don't think that it's enough to carry a game, especially with the otherwise simplistic and stiff visuals. At this point, it would probably be better as a short or feature-length film than as a game, it's about as long as one anyway.

Scanner Sombre is by no means an unenjoyable game, I liked playing it, and the single character in the game was an element I found interesting (along with the unique and occasionally quite beautiful visuals and sound design). However, the problem is that it would be quite hard to justify purchasing this game with its incredibly short length, and is what ultimately leads me to say that you can pass on this one. This is an excellent example of a game that you will play through in a single sitting and never open again, you've seen it all after that first sitting after all.