Gamescom is a huge event. In over 10 venues packed with everything from hands-on gaming to merch to cosplay, corporate spaces and everything in between, it’s nearly impossible to see and do everything in the one week of every year it takes place. I know that I have personally seen at most a fraction of the things I would have liked to see there lately, which makes it all the more happy that I did spend just 30 minutes of that precious time chatting with the team at Mad Head Games and hands-on with Scars Above.
If you haven’t heard that title before, you’d be forgiven for sure. It certainly wasn’t on my radar until I saw the trailer presented at Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live event that kicked off at Gamescom this year. Even then, though I was intrigued, I have to admit I wasn’t completely sold on what seemed to be something along the lines of Housemarque’s excellent AAA third-person sci-fi shooter, Returnal, only on an AA budget. Nevertheless, the surreal, dark sci-fi setting was more than enough for me to get invested and excited to try the game itself, especially to reconcile the comparisons I’d made to Returnal. The short answer? Scars Above is undeniably its own special beast.
I almost feel bad for bringing up the other game when talking to the team at Mad Head during my demo as it’s clearly a parallel that has been drawn with them many times since the release of Returnal. Of course, anyone with any sense of the long and top-secret cycles of a game’s development would hopefully understand that Scars Above was conceived long before anyone knew Returnal was a thing. The more interesting and apt comparison here, however, is with that of Metroid Prime, which still follows the areas where Housemarque was also clearly inspired by the bona fide Gamecube classic, but manifests itself more excitingly in this game’s approach to exploration and discovery.
Scars Above is what I would call a “scan-em-up”, a game that drops you into incredible and surreal alien landscapes and instructs you to understand them bit by bit. fangorical part. The world you find yourself in and the way you survive in it are quite systemic, so information is the key to understanding those systems, hence the need to scan everything new and interesting that you come across.
There’s also a narrative context to it, I won’t spend too much time on the story here as I think it’s best experienced fresh, but the protagonist, Kate, is an astronaut scientist whose research crew gets stuck on the mysterious exoplanet it’s in. game takes place. Kate is by no means a soldier, but she is smart and resourceful and has just enough survival training to, armed with the right knowledge, rescue her crew members and find a way home. The Mad Head Games team tells me that unlike some comparable games, the core story in Scars Above will be told in a very direct and defined way, giving players actual answers to the mysteries rather than getting caught up in symbolism and open interpretation.
Knowledge also lends itself to Kate’s survivability by unlocking new abilities and creating potential thanks to her technical and xenobiological background. That becomes important when judging against the diverse and violent fauna on this exoplanet, most of which require deliberate approaches to deal with effectively. Despite a Souls-esque structure in the way things like saving points work, Scars Above isn’t exactly a roguelike, but it’s clearly designed to offer a challenge to those who want it and choose it. Your mechanical skill in moving and shooting will be helpful, but not as important as clever use of the environment and appropriate equipment to handle the situation.
A good early example in my practice session was dealing with a particularly ugly and deadly beast that was eating my bullets by luring it into a nearby shallow body of water and pumping it full of electricity as soon as the game registered it as having the “wet” state. These statuses are a commonality in Scars Above, a little further down the path I used fire ammunition to light alien cocoons before they had a chance to hatch, and the developers told me there are many more examples later in the game , including things like ice cream and more mixing different properties. Aside from the prevalence and importance of research in the game, I think the fun I had with the battles was another pleasant surprise from my time with it. It’s mechanically interesting, nicely contextual, and also just feels really good to be on.
It also helps that from the designs of the various planetary biomes and the creatures that inhabit them, to the impressive technicalities that run on Unreal Engine 4, Scars Above is a mighty good looking game for its scope. It’s not a next-gen blockbuster level of eye candy, but it has a distinct look and a lot of attention to detail that manifests itself especially when inspecting items, rummaging around abandoned crates or 3D printing new gear. It seems to take a lot of inspiration from many sources in all media, but it brings them together in a cohesive and unique way that makes me really want to see more.
Whether you were completely unfamiliar with it until now, or have seen the announcement trailer and neatly archived it in the “maybe” folder, I urge you to pay attention to Scars Above. It was easily the biggest surprise for me at this year’s Gamescom event and I’m genuinely looking forward to more when it comes out early next year on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.
The author of this article was present at Gamescom as a guest of PLAION.
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