Realism is a🌞 pretty vague concept in video games. We use games to gun down hordes of zombies, rule empires, soar across the galaxy, and plunder treasure from lost tombs, yet there remains a demand that these fantasies feel authentic.🧔
The rise of open-world survival games has opened the floodgates of realism-as-gameplay as devs scramble to starve, freeze, and bleed characters in the most lifelike ways possible, and Scum, which launched out of early access on June 17, shows that we’re takingꦜ all the wrong lessons from the realism arms race.
Stomach Issues
proudly proclaims that developer Gamepires hꦇas created “the most complex and greatest metabolism system ever done.” While I’m willing to concede its complexity, I hadn’t realized that there was an ongoing competition to make a single metabolism system in a game, let alone the best.
The game tracks everything that your character ingests, maintaining a running s൲imulation of your overall nutrition - fats, sugars, carbs, even the full range of vitamins and minerals - before affecting your stats based on your overall muscle mass and body fat, which in turn can be altered by the activities you carry out.
If that weren’t enough, everything that goes into your body has to come out, one way or another; in most cases, that means you need to relieve yourself occasionally,ಞ lest biology take over and do it for you at an inopportune time. Additionally, eating tainted food or drinking unclean water can cause your character to vomit, emptying your stomach of any undigested food.
It’s a lot, and certainly impressive, but it begs the question of who was asking for a system like this in the first🧸 place, especially in an edgy game about hardbitten🎐 prisoners on an island full of cyborg zombies? What need does it fulfill? What segment of the video game market was going untapped because this system didn’t yet exist?
I’m all for innovation, but the first job of every game is to be fun. Counting carbs and calories belongs on a health and wellness app. By contrast, Scum’s injury system dispenses with the same old hit points in a compelling way; taking hits causes individual injuries to parts of your body, which need to be treated s꧅eparately and can worsen if left alone. I wish more attention had been given to that side of the game, since it’s the true standout feature even if it isn’t quite as innovative. It makes brawls with single zombies (or Puppets, as the game calls them) relatively easy to escape with cuts and bruises, but knife fights and shootouts against armed humans turn deadly fast.
It Was Never About Realism
Of course, given Scum’s overall vibe, I have a hard time believing that its in-depth metabolism tracker is anything other than the world’s most complex poop joke. The game is packed with middle-school crudity; the defau𝕴lt character name is Ben Dover, the first screen of character creation has a slider for how big you want your naughty bits to be, a🅷nd the whole thing just reeks of edginess for edginess’ sake.
The pinnacle of Scum’s tastelessness is the💟 ꩵoption to “commit suicide” right on the pause menu.
The “size slider” is the real tell for where the game’s priorities lie. Adjusting your character’s hog is literally one of the first things you do at the start🅺 of the game, right up there with picking stats. The Supporter Pack even unlocks an extra two inches and a “willy warmer” cosmetic.
Scum is clearly a case where “realism” is used as an excuse to be provocative and oh-so-c♈ontroversial. Whatever potential its health system might have had (and I think its HP-free injury mechanics do have merit), it will be remembered as the ga🥂me where you crap your pants. Streamers and their audiences will have a laugh with it, then move onto whatever game captures the Internet hive-mind’s fascination next week.
