When you scan (e.g.) a ceiling full of stalactites, the LIDAR rays get absorbed by the hanging rocks. My personal favourite effect is the casting of false shadows. Or the interference aperture of the scanner, which is visible whenever you scan from one place without moving in the characteristic unscanned cross pattern, as if a large negative area were burned into the distant wall. Like the way different colours effortlessly start translating to different distances. But the real visually impressive stuff doesn’t come to the fore until you’ve had some time to play with it. It has a certain wow-factor from the start, when you first learn how it works and see how easily and clearly it can map interactive 3D environments. The noisy hitscan painting LIDAR scanner is definitely Scanner Sombre strongest element. All the same, Scanner Sombre is never pulse-pounding or intense it’s always some flavour of subdued, whether that’s ‘calm, because I’m alone in this cave and I can just scan and paint as much as I want’ or ‘careful, because I think I just heard something and I don’t want to give whatever that might have been any ideas‘.Īnd make no mistake: I use colouring books as a metaphor because this game is gorgeous. A calm experience woven through with a sense of creeping dread, because especially sound-wise Scanner Sombre does try to keep you on your toes: Music is used to good effect whenever a certain scene needs particular setting fast, but particularly the sound effects deserve credit for pervasively keeping your attention on the creepy side of town. There’s almost no pressure to perform and hardly any mechanical challenge, making it a uniquely calm experience. It’s the boiled-down essence of exploration and discovery for its own sake: Here is a cool cave, here is a tool that lets you learn more and navigate around the cool cave, Go Do That Thing. Scanner Sombre for the most part is a really neat, very Zen experience. Oh, now I’m starting to see what this is! So that’s what I did: I walked around dark caves, and slowly and meticulously painted areas until they looked cool and interesting. Except in Scanner Sombre the game even fills out the appropriate colour for you. It’s like one of those paint-by-numbers things where there are so many small shapes that you can’t really see what you’re painting until you get close to done. Easily 95% of the play experience consists of you running around caves so dark they might as well be featureless, and filling them in with pretty colours to slowly learn of the shape underneath. The thing is that Scanner Sombre is basically a colouring book. Of not even necessarily ‘difficult’ maybe ‘meaningless’ would be more apt. It feels difficult to bring my usual suite of critique tools to bear on a game where the majority of active run-time is spent lighting up caves.
That said… I’ve been trying to find a good approach to lead in this review, but I’ve already revised this paragraph like five times. At the very least, engaging enough to keep me around until the credits rolled. Start to finish, I’ve spent a little over three hours on Scanner Sombre.