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My favorite professors were the ones who assigned papers that “are as long as they need to be to get your point across.” Or, in the words of Winston Churchill: “A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.”
In some ways, Scanner Sombre accomplishes this with flying colors – and not just the ones shot by your LIDAR system. It’s a great concept – you are an amateur spelunker equipped with a fancy new handheld geographic scanning system. That’s a bit hard of an idea to get across, so I’d recommend just watching the trailer. The execution of the main mechanic – your scanning apparatus – is brilliant. It’s fun, intuitive, and conveys a fantastic sense of being entirely in the dark – you can only see what you’ve scanned. Who knows what else is out there? What lurks in the shadows of your point cloud? The game goes on for exactly as long as it can introduce upgrades to your handheld LIDAR, and then it’s over. It took me a little under two hours, all told – a short experience, but a good one.
Where Scanner Sombre falls short, though, is in doing anything more than the basics (apparently they developed this in a month, so it’s somewhat understandable). As it is, it’s basically an underground version of Dear Esther (which isn’t totally a bad thing) – which really misses out on a great deal of things they could have done with it. The plot is a bit tenuous, and without more things to interact with or discover, is forced to stay that way. Even worse, the things you discover become more mundane, rather than more Cthulhu-esque; given the grand stories about cults, sacrifices, and witch trials, I was a little disappointed to enter a mine near the end.
There are no enemies to speak of, which is a massive missed opportunity. Think about this: you’re alone in the utter darkness. If you can see the enemy, you’re already dead. All you’ve got is a handheld scanner which can tell you where they were when you scanned. The game hints at this, but never actually does anything.
As it is, Scanner Sombre feels more like a tutorial level. A very good, engaging tutorial level. But nothing more. Yet.