--The Apparition, Scars Above
Thanks to a veneer of scientific emphasis such as with its chemical reaction system and fiber being its item crafting material, Scars Above amounts to more than a wholly bland game. Mildly reminiscent of other science fiction games like Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol and with some parallels to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, it does stand apart with its element-based aspects of combat and its more overtly empirical approach to standard gaming conventions. A key example is how an upgrade to Kate's health is described as fortifying her immune system rather than simply reducing the duration of harmful status effects. Regarding the story, hints of catastrophic genetic experimentation at the hands of an enormous being called the Custodian appear early on, with Scars Above telling a mostly conventional narrative that, like many other parts of the game, needed more depth to reach greatness in spite of flickers of uniqueness. Overall, Kate Ward's journey through an extraterrestrial world is a middling blend of (sometimes) truly frenetic and inventive combat with minimalistic or underdeveloped philosophical exploration, characterization, and storytelling. Oh, what could have been.
Production Values
This is absolutely not the prettiest Xbox One game still or in motion. From the opening cinematic onward, bland textures and a degree of pixellation are predominant visual characteristics. Extremely blurry vegetation in the second phase of the game looks like it is on a poorly running computer or Switch game of low graphical quality. It does not help that sluggish performance is still a problem in certain moments. As ordinary as it is for a given game to not be the best representative of a platform's graphical capabilities, I have rarely seen an Xbox One game with such minimal polish (this sort of thing is more commonplace on the Switch). The audio unfortunately fares worse at times: the early cutscenes have mismatched voice acting and lip animations, and this does not go away later in the game, a practically inexcusable flaw. Also unusual is the initial loading time for the main menu and another loading issue. When I attempted to bypass the logo screens when launching the game from the Xbox menu, the screen went black and stayed that way. I had to close the game and restart the software, allowing the logo screens to unfold without interruption, to actually get to the main menu on multiple occasions.
Gameplay
Kate travels through a series of interconnected environments with their own ecosystems and hazards, frequently encountering enemies. While there are optional items to discover and minor mandatory puzzles, locating the items tends to be a simple matter of walking into an fairly obvious alcove or pathway leading away from the objective marker, and the puzzles seldom require more than a few moments of examination to solve. Upon Kate activating a mysterious type of pillar to save progress as she travels, much like resting at a bonfire in Dark Souls, slain enemies are reset. Like Darksiders III, itself a Souls-like title, Scars Above features no minimap, so objectives must be navigated to through the world from pillar to pillar until teleportation is available near the end of the game. Upgrades to Kate and her weapons, like ammunition extensions or lower charge time, help alleviate the difficulty of combat, yet the player's reaction time is incredibly vital from the start. Dodging and quickly using health items is crucial. Boss fights can be even more brutal, partly due to the stamina bar's early limitations.
Instead of relating to experience points from killing ordinary enemies, the progression of upgrades and abilities not earned by just completing the game is tied to Kate's knowledge level. Filling the bar increases her level, which occurs when she scans the corpses of enemy types after first defeating them or picks up scattered knowledge cubes in the environment that transmit information to her mind--though she seems to stupidly confuse memorizing scientific information with logically knowing the external world beyond the perceptions of her mind, as well as neural states with their correlated mental states when a mind and not a brain is what grasps knowledge. Defeating bosses also grants a knowledge boost. The bosses can be scanned with a radar device to pinpoint their less apparent weak areas, with element-specific weak spots visible along their exterior bodies. Some spots incur more damage when shot with electric or flame projectiles, for instance. One boss in particular, called The Construct, can only be defeated with an especially elaborate and creative process that involves all firearm element types acquired up to that point.
The elements are foundational to the chemical reactions system: for example, freezing enemies that live in water and then shooting them with electrical weaponry deals additional damage. Various enemy types are vulnerable to specific elements, and chaining them can kill creatures far more quickly. Environmental scans and trial and error can uncover evidence for which element will inflict the most severe damage. When applicable, colored weak spots corresponding to the colors of certain projectile types. Even identifying the weak spots does not mean they are easily accessible, nevertheless. Very quick, accurate aiming and special abilities like deploying a field that slows enemy movement can be critical. Also vital is utilizing fast reflexes and Kate's gadgets--one of which shields her body through an energy protection, another of which allows her to move quickly to position herself for ideal shots--when suddenly confronting certain smaller, non-boss enemies without overt weaknesses like Bipedal Stalkers, with their rapid movements and cloaking (at one point, a Bipedal Stalker even mimicks the voice of a friend of Kate!). The device that slows enemies is described erroneously, though: it is impossible to slow time as the text insists is happening because a moment cannot elapse any slower than a moment's time, but the rate at which events occur could hypothetically be slowed by supernatural or technological means.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
After a strange structure called the Metahedron appears near Earth, a group of scientists approaching in a vessel for observational analysis are caught in bizarre events when a voice speaks to them. Protagonist Kate wakes up on what appears to be another planet with hostile life forms. She quickly encounters a purple hologram-like image of a humanoid being that provides gradual hints about devastation that has befallen this world. Something called the Custodian has killed or, it is revealed, experimented on the "Apparition's" species after moving on from non-humanoid animals.
Intellectual Content
The science-oriented trappings of the game provide more of a thematic basis for tasks like examining creatures. Other games might have the player look at corpses or environmental features to gather information, but few reference components of an animal's nervous system or the apparent means by which it generates bioelectricity as this one does. In a handful of cases, the player must search for enough clues about an alien's anatomy or the workings of unfamiliar technology to make a "deduction". It is just that inferring or extrapolating from fallible sensory perceptions is not the same as discovering objective logical necessities! If a concept is not true in itself like logical axioms or does not follow necessarily from something that is demonstrably true, it is not actually knowable. However, Kate never makes this distinction aloud and seems to conflate scientific perceptions with absolute logical certainty at times.
To its credit, Scars Above still neither promotes an atheistic philosophy of science (the extraterrestrial Apparition even acknowledges that the "Code of Life" could have been intentionally created by a divine being) nor promotes epistemological scientism. Even so, more fundamental than the uncaused cause and the existence of the cosmos in its entirety are the necessary truths of logic, which cannot be false and thus are only things that are inherently true and on which all else metaphysically and epistemologically depends. When it comes to affirming rationalistic truths, Kate is woefully pathetic. She says early in the game that the idea of a weapon is a human concept, but while humans can make or use weapons, the idea is a logically objective concept that humans can discover or reflect on. Humans do not make the concept of a weapon logically possible. Kate also seems to assume she was just on the Hermes after waking up when there are many ways sensory and memory perceptions can be illusory other than the fact that one has the immediate mental experience.
When the Apparition says that the Custodian (shown above) is an artificial intelligence created by her race to help decipher the Code of Life, the "data" of which is left unspecified, Kate points out that it was not designed to have empathy, which she apparently thinks is a vital although lacking empathy absolutely does not mean someone is or will become cruel. The Custodian resorts to harmful measures as it uses nanomachines to scour genes for the Code, yes. Logically, empathy is nonetheless not a necessity for being a rational or righteous person; neither does an AI have to become malevolent. No one makes assumptions, neglects reason, has no concern for whatever moral obligations exist, is disinterested in kindness, or is sadistic just because they lack empathy. It is only a feeling irrelevant to objective truth, one that could compel a foolish person to overlook or fail to live out logical truths or moral obligations out of emotionalistic concern for others.
The Custodian, its goals, and its experiments are the reasons why, incidentally or not, the game somewhat parallels the very philosophically charged Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The protagonist explores the former habitation of a taller humanoid species that had accomplished genetic breakthroughs (like the Engineers) and faces a rogue AI hell-bent on experimentation to discover more about biological organisms. Now, the Custodian might not be as personally complex as the android David, but the parallels remain in the midst of the game's focus on how the bizarrities of cellular biology correlate to macroscopic morphology. If only the game had delved more into its highly promising lore and the genuinely deep issues it probes! All the same, genetic experimentation and artificial intelligence are very significant and timely issues to hold up to the light in entertainment media, though they merit the context of a better overall game.
Conclusion
Scars Above does improve with time due to an expanding arsenal and an unraveling plot enigma about the Custodian's nature. As it introduces pivotal philosophical ideas as they relate to scientific research and development, though, the game fails to explore any of them with great depth on a purely logical level or the level of scientific details that are in turn inevitably dictated metaphysically by logical necessity. For a 10+ hour science fiction game with occasional horror elements, it is not a bad title in spite of some major flaws in execution and some abysmal production values. But it does illustrate why only having strong combat with a leaning towards caution and strategy (until you get more powerful) cannot elevate a game to the greatest heights possible. Lacking AAA polish does not have to cripple a game by any means--a deficient story and execution will do that in part or as a whole all on its own.
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