Scanner Sombre
Scanner Sombre is a beautiful, brief, and unexpected follow-up from the developer of Prison Architect.
This is the unexpected, and rather sudden, next game from Prison-Architect developer Introversion Software. It’s a short, but sweet, exploration game in which you make your way from deep within a pitch black cave all the way up towards the surface. The environment is entirely invisible, and the only way to find your way around is by shooting out specks of light onto the walls with a LIDAR scanner. There’s no limit to using the scanner, and you can place an infinite number of LIDAR dots on the geometry around you, all of which will stay exactly where they land. Add in a rainbow color scheme to indicate distance, and the effect ends up making this one of the prettiest games I’ve played in a long time.
The LIDAR scanner is marvellous. Slowly filling out the corners of a room is both exciting and slightly unnerving—you will never know what each new area will look like. I enjoyed revealing what I thought would be an empty room, only to catch dots on a pillar or a rock jutting into the middle of it. My new mission then became circling that object to map it entirely, which felt like carving a landscape. And, as I revealed more, I started to get pieces of the history behind these caves—coupled with some onscreen text to explain what was in front of me, albeit in a somewhat hamfisted way.
It’s a good thing sending out those LIDAR dots is so captivating because it’s the bulk of what ScannerSombre has to offer. Completing the game only took me about two-and-a-half hours, which left me conflicted. Scanning never overstayed its welcome, and I enjoyed using it the whole way through—if this were a ten-hour game, though, I’d have been bored with the concept long before it was over. On the other hand, interesting ideas and interactions with the concept were only briefly touched on and left me wanting more.
An idea I’m glad was explored well was water: LIDAR dots rest briefly on liquid surfaces before fading away, and they reflect hazy versions of the dots that you’ve painted on the walls. Wading through water messed with my vision and stopped me from scanning, deepening my unease.
That said, other interesting ideas aren’t given equal attention. Scanner Sombre isn’t a horror game, but it drifts towards that genre in its first half. Being alone in the dark puts me on edge, and when ScannerSombre wanted to make my skin crawl it succeeded. After a while, though, that suspense disappeared like the walls around me. I wasn’t looking for it to ramp up to jump scares, but Scanner Sombre’s opening hour plays the discordant tones of a suspense game and then never actually becomes one.
Echolocation
One of the reasons that tone is set so perfectly is ScannerSombre’s immaculate audio design. I could tell things like what type of surface I was walking on or how big an area was based just on the audio of my footsteps. Stone turns to crunchy gravel before I slosh through a puddle, and I knew the puddle was coming because I heard the drips from a stalactite above it. Sound paints a picture so vivid I forgot I was looking at was invisible geometry mapped by colored dots.
A little detective work arrives towards the end, but just once. I found an elevator that needed to be powered up with cables running out from it in opposite directions. To find the buttons that would provide power, I had to scan and reveal the cables and then follow where they led. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a nice way to let me engage with my surroundings. But this was the only part of the game that I played with this idea, and it came a stone’s throw away from the credits.
It’s not scathing criticism to say ‘there were good sequences that I wanted more of’, but it did leave me feeling like Scanner-Sombre missed its full potential. I am glad Introversion had the restraint not to milk the LIDAR effect throughout an overly-long romp filled with puzzles and cheap spooks—but it played with the idea so well in little variations that it left me wanting more.
Slowly filling a room is both exciting and slightly unnerving