Certainly, the darkness you’re so often confronted with and the way that the LIDAR works could make some very compelling and terrifying gameplay. They’re dismissed in a rather off hand fashion all too soon, precluding the tantalising possibility of this game riding the recent wave of first person horror. Scanner Sombre can at times be rather unsettling, especially as the LIDAR system glitches out and you’re suddenly confronted by humanoid forms that really can’t be explained, with the sound design really helping to build the atmosphere at these moments. 1 2 The player awakens in a tent inside a cave after finding an augmented reality headset and a LIDAR scanner, the player can illuminate the surrounding environment using dots. There’s hints of mysticism and the possibility of something supernatural during the early areas you explore, but the pay off really appears out of nowhere and is rather unsatisfying. Scanner Sombre is exploration video game played from a first-person perspective. It meanders from one topic to another, exploring some of the history of the caves, from cultists and witch sacrifices to more modern day mining, as well as the reason for your journey through them. Entering into a new room, that burst mode helps to create some of the most striking visuals possible in the game, creating a wavy grid of lines from one particular viewpoint, leaving pools of shadowy darkness from obscured areas that become apparent as soon as you move.Ī loose story is told in rare moments with text appearing in the top right hand corner of the screen, as a sort of internal monologue from the protagonist. First it’s being able to control the spread of the laser beams that shoot out of it, letting you colour in cavernous rooms or focus tightly on a single spot, then it’s zooming your view, finally a burst mode that will paint everything in sight with a tightly knit weave of lasers. Over the course of your journey, you come across further LIDAR devices that add new abilities to the one in your hand. In that regard it could be seen as something of a disappointment, especially with the little hints that it could have become more.
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It really is a case of a game that knows how to do one thing and do it well, making the most of the fantastic visuals that you can create within the game but never really breaking beyond them.
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The Scanner Sombre Soundtrack had been created by Alistair Lindsay, it was released as a free download on 14 Aug, 2018.Boiling it down, this is another ambulatory exploration game – a walking simulator, if you must – but one with an utterly unique style of presentation that keeps you constantly engaged. Virtual reality compatibility has been implemented into the game post-release, supporting both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and was released in late June 2017. Introversion markets the game as being inspired by Gone Home and Dear Esther.
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The game was released for macOS and Windows on 26 April 2017. The prototype was developed in one month during 2015 by several members at the studio while they were working on content updates for their previous game Prison Architect. A prototype of the game was showcased at EGX Rezzed in early 2016. Scanner Sombre was developed by Introversion Software. Restarting the game in "New Game+" mode and using the "material scanner" mode available on the scanner at the start, the player can find their dead body that was otherwise blending into the terrain in "distance scanner" mode. The player regains control and can go pick up the scanner again, but this time the protagonist is shocked to see that their arms are made entirely of glowing dots. Once the protagonist encounters their family, they are slowly transported back down through the caves they explored all the way to the starting tent, and the dots illuminating the mine slowly disappear. It is revealed that the protagonist ventured so deep into the mine that they eventually died there, and they are now reliving their dying memories while their family mourns them on the surface. Occasionally the player can find upgrades to the scanner that unlock various features, such as more dense scanning or a map.Īs the game progresses, the protagonist begins to remember the past and it is eventually revealed that the trek is not headed deeper into the mine, but out of it. When approaching such scenes, the protagonist's vision occasionally glitches out, which the protagonist attributes to hardware failure, but also notes that there have been rumors about the cave containing ghosts. As the protagonist traverses the cave, they note that no one has gone this deep into the mine before they find evidence of a cultist monastery who performed sacrifices as well as witch-hunts, as well as various remnants of mining expeditions, a lot of which ended in tragedy. The player awakens in a tent inside a cave after finding an augmented reality headset and a LIDAR scanner, the player can illuminate the surrounding environment using dots. Scanner Sombre is exploration video game played from a first-person perspective.