The Protagonist

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The Host
Classification	Unknown Humanoid
Sex	Male
Methods	Weaponry

The Host is the main playable character of Scorn.

Appearance

The player character is a humanoid creature. The most significant difference between him and a human is that his torso lacks any skin and reveals a slightly different organ and bone structure. His lungs are exposed to the elements and have six holes within them. He uses his left hand to interact with the machinery around him. This hand is pierced with a specialized biomechanical key that cause some bleeding at first, because this special "hidden blade" key gets fused with his skin.

Depending on the trailer, his arms and hands would either be stripped of skin or would have it with artificial etchings and engravings within them.

His face is similar to a human's in the sense that he has eyes and a nose, but lacks ears and a mouth entirely. Additionally, the skin on his face does not cover the whole head, leaving the sides, the back, and mouth area covered in thick red flesh. In-game as well as concept art, he is shown to have an external penis-like reproductive organ that folds upward against his abdomen while not in use.

The Host's body changes the longer the Parasite travels with him. At several points, spikey tendrils grow out of the Host's legs and arms. The chest of the Host gets torn open more and more as well.

Personality

NOTE: The below is in reference to the Prologue character.

The Host seems to be a rather uncaring humanoid. This is shown in the way he treats the little moldman he frees earlier in the game. If he releases the moldman from his shell, he forces the arm into arm device that gives him a biomechanical key to open a door. Afterward, he forces the moldman into the device that opens the door. Once the door is open, the Host abandons the moldman.

Story

Prologue

The first Protagonist is seen crawling across the ground, attempting to reach a tall structure in the distance before they fall into a ravine, awakening inside of a decrepit underground facility. Navigating the corridors, the Protagonist acquires a biomechanical key that is fused onto his arm, and a door that requires two people to open. Finding a storage facility, he removes a Moldman from the wall, being given two options for how to release him from his shell; a saw and scoop device. By using the scoop, it will kill the Moldman and sever his left arm. But with the saw, he is removed from the shell unharmed and follows the Protagonist. Regardless, the Protagonist grafts a key onto the Moldman’s arm and uses it to open the two-man door in order to progress.

He eventually comes across a Tool Gun, which is needed to complete a series of puzzles in an abandoned recycling facility filled with Drones. Upon loading three pods into a tree-like structure, the pods begin bursting as the structure malfunctions, knocking the Protagonist to the ground. The contents of the pods begin leaking onto the floor and engulf him as his vision fades to black. An unknown amount of time later, he suddenly jolts awake, freeing himself from the now hardened material that previously encased him, and begins crawling away.

Act 2 Onwards

The second Protagonist awakens inside of a pod growing on a massive, organic wall (referred to as the “Genesis Wall” in the art book). Breaking out of the material covering him, he falls from the pod and pulls an umbilical cord-like structure from his torso, before venturing into the ravaged terrain, littered with numerous humanoid corpses. Eventually finding a large building, the Protagonist enters inside and notices a strange creature crawling across the walls nearby. He briefly encounters the creature again later when he sees it crawl into a vent above the pathway he was using. He later finds a biomechanical key, like the one the first Protagonist used, and while attempting to find items required for a key puzzle, he is ambushed by the creature from before. The Parasite quickly overpowers the Protagonist, tearing chunks of flesh out of his torso and digging its limbs into the wounds in order to latch onto him. The Protagonist picks up the Tool Gun attached to the end of the Parasite’s tail (hinting at the creature’s possible origins), and continues to explore the facility. The Protagonist later acquires a pistol attachment for the Tool Gun and an Inventory Creature for holding health and ammunition, all the while having the Parasite dig its limbs further into his body, which gradually drains his health and begins to kill him.

After coming across a massive creature called the Crater Queen, the source of the various creatures that inhabit the facility, the Protagonist makes his way around the area and begins activating long-dormant machinery that the Queen’s body had seemingly grown over, causing excruciating pain to the creature. The mechanisms powered up the elevator that the Crater Queen was positioned on and, upon activating it, eventually caused the Crater Queen to be killed when the elevator reached to top of the facility, crushing it against the ceiling. Finding a train-like vehicle, the Protagonist enters it and travels across a lengthy railway until he reaches his final destination: the desolate city of Polis.

The Protagonist makes his way through the city’s vacant pathways, occasionally finding himself being attacked by decrepit Cyborgs and their Homunculus pilots, while the Parasite continues to take its toll on his body, eventually causing vine-like growths form across his body and completely overtake his arm, making him unable to use his hands or switch between the attachments for the Tool Gun. Eventually, he comes across an operating device just as the Parasite rips his chest open and bursts through it. Placing himself on the machine, he uses a claw device to pull the Parasite off of him, revealing that the creature is in fact the original, heavily-mutated Protagonist from the Prologue, before it frees itself and flees the room. The Protagonist, now heavily injured and without any of his tools, stumbles his way through the halls of Polis until he comes upon a large chamber, filled with strange altar-like devices and a massive collection of organic material forming a web-like structure overhead, in fact being a kind of hive-mind composed of the brains of the inhabitants of Polis. Climbing onto one of these altars, the Protagonist is strapped in as a multi-armed surgeon robot begins cutting and repositioning his exposed organs while cutting open his skull and connecting him to the hive-mind, which allows him to control a pair of Shells in order to open a passage through a large mural at the other end of the room while he is operated on by the robot.

Using one of the Shells to remove the surgeon’s blade arm, the Protagonist is removed from the altar and carried by the Shell, who attaches the blade to its shoulder in order to continue operating in the Protagonist as he is carried through the passageway towards a large, mysterious portal. However, just before they could reach it, the Shell began to slow down until it completely stood still. Returning his consciousness to his original body, the Protagonist could only watch helplessly as the Parasite returned and knocked him out of the Shell’s arms onto the ground. He feebly tried to to crawl towards the portal, only to be dragged back by the Parasite, which coiled itself around him and burst through his torso once again. The Protagonist reached out towards the unresponsive Shell before collapsing, finally losing consciousness as his blood pools around him.

In the final moments of the game, a cutscene shows the Parasite gradually overtaking the Protagonist, who is still alive, until the final shot, which shows that the two have merged into a single, massive organism laying immobile in front of the portal.

Trivia

• Many refer to the protagonist as "Scornguy" which is the same naming convention given to the nameless protagonist of ID Software's DOOM (1993).
• The developers stated, that players play as themselves so they can get the feeling that they are trapped in a nightmare.^{[>citation needed]}
• It is all but directly stated that the Protagonist is in fact one of two separate characters you control. The Parasite is believed to be the mutated form of the player character from the Prologue, who stumbles into the recycling facility and appears older, more experienced, and colder towards the lifeforms he encounters (shown when he aggressively drags the Moldman if he releases it from its shell). The Protagonist that players experience being "born" from the Genesis Wall is implied to be essentially a fully-grown newborn, new to the world and unaware of the horrors soon to befall him.

Gallery

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  Cover image for The Protagonist's section in the Scorn artbook

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  Concept art and description for The Protagonist

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  More concepts of the Scorn protagonist

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  The Protagonist and the Parasite

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  Front of body

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  Back of body.