A very adequate horror game experience.
Teen Horror Movies were movies like Disturbing Behavior and The Faculty where there's a bunch of idiot teenagers are suspicious of their high school and prove their suspicions right when they discover some awful secret fueling their teachers and it's up to them and their stupidity to stop the teachers and whatever contrived plot they have for their students.
ObsCure involves a group of plucky, unrealistically archetypal teens getting involved with the dark secrets their high school hides when one of their friends who doubles as one character's sibling goes missing on campus one night. Too scared to involve the police considering the suggested drug references, three kids go on a quest to find their missing peer after school only to find it teeming with monsters.
Surprisingly, the game introduces an updtaed Martian Gothic style of game play in that you can choose to play one of either character at any time and the characters have different talents. The cast includes:
Josh, the journalistic type who can look for different items and a supposed AV geek despite the fact he's about as androgynous and handsome as a teeny bopper pretty boy. Ashely, the aggressive cheerleader and apparently the only teen with any firearm training who can somehow fire multiple shots and throw stronger hits. Stan, the stoner kid who's flunking every class, yet can pick locks faster than everyone else and who is just along for the ride. Kenny, the missing peer and jock-type who can sprint faster than everyone and surprisingly has the most competent dialogue out of everyone. Then there's Shannon, the cutesy sex appeal character who's Kenny's younger sister despite barely looking like him and who served as the main point of replay value for me after awhile. She supposedly can heal people better and give lots of tips, but the only aspect I noticed was how she moved her hips (^_^).
ObsCure's game play is similar to Code Veronica in that you view the characters from different set camera angles that follow the character until you reach the next camera angle. It's actually very easy to see what's going on and the movement feels okay at first, but like Code Veronica many of the characters actions feel a little stiff and prolonged:
Every character swings a weapon or reloads during combat so slowly and meticulously it's like they're in their fifties and their jogging speed only does a little to evade your tenacious enemies. All of this could be forgiven if the game didn't have two rather painful additions to it: Real-Time inventory menus and permanent 2D controls. The 2D controls seem real simple for any game, but throw set camera angles into the equation and navigation becomes a very mild, but tenacious annoyance. The Real-Time inventory screen certainly seems realistic and innovative until you realize it kills the fun and strategy when you have to switch weapons or heal at the last minute.
It's worth mentioning that this is the very first multiplayer anti-online Survival Horror game and it's certainly a welcome edition, but seeing how the camera has to go wherever both the characters go as well as the aforementioned RTI addition and once again whatever strategies with your friend you have will be for naught.
Thankfully though, if one character or more in your party dies, you can still beat the game so long as one character is left which is actually an innovative idea, but it barely has any dramatic or replay value impact, all it changes is the ending. Much like Alone in the dark, you get items that allow you to save anywhere you like which is a feature I do appreciate after playing so many Survival Horror games with stationary save spots.
One aspect that felt like wasted potential in the game was the map icons: every time your map screen comes up, your characters are shown represented as little colored circles with the first letter of their name on them. For a long time I've always wanted a Survival Horror game that identified characters on a map according to the main color of their clothes (kind of like Twisted Metal with the color of their cars), but in ObsCure the color of each character is represented by whatever background is behind their character profile in the character screen. It's a very subtle nit-pick, but the more you think about it the more perplexing the decision is, it's like using board game tactics to aid your quest for survival. And seeing how the circles all have the letter of their first name on their icon, there's actually no point to the character coloring at all.
The graphics are acceptable for its time: they aren't too crisp or hard to see, though they're nowhere near stellar, especially when you see the character's faces in CG cutscenes; almost everyone has these weird, squished, elongated faces making them look almost... elven in nature.
The monsters are surprisingly well designed and they all have unique features and surprisingly strong research behind them. I'm not saying they sound realistic, but it actually sounds like the development staff put some effort into making them sound just as varied as they look.
The memos you read add to the game's story and what little depth it has, but they're all very lengthy and well detailed, making the memos sound like, once again, the developers were really into the project. I appreciate well detailed memos in horror games, though, especially after reading the embarrassingly retarded memos you were forced to collect in Silent Hill 4 where most of them were so short and badly written that Post-It note messages put them to shame.
The sound department is a Chinese Chicken Salad, though: the sound effects consist of some genuinely original effects for virtually every individual monster as well as some ominous ambient noises, but a lot of the background noises sounded like they were ripped from the most recent background noises from previous Survival Horror games like that distant monster roar or random metal pipe clanging from... ugh... Silent Hill 4.
The soundtrack applies to the analogy as well: composed by Olivier Deriviere who shows some excellent compositional decisions to make the game sound more dramatic and intense than imaginable with the use of various instruments including the piano, violins and I swear I heard the Triangle somewhere.
But he tends to overuse trombones, trumpets and horns for enemy encounters, some of which use this embarrassing 'wah-wah' noise. There's also the school nurse's theme that overuses an otherwise stellar children's choir so the kids make an even more embarrassing 'loo-hoo' noise that gets annoying the very second it's played. The game has some fantastically evil background music for the map screens and for certain areas that I can't tell if they're orchestrated or synthesized, but they added a cozy layer of cold and scary sounding atmosphere to the game and made up for most of the game's orchestral snags. At least they would if you didn't have to crank the volume to the TV up all the way to hear them.
I'm not going to say ObsCure is a long and forgotten classic, but it's worth remembering that it came out at a time when Survival Horror games were starting to sputter where they stopped being about atmospheric delivery and started being about what sells, so despite its roots, I have some respect for it. Not a lot, but just enough to recommend it so long as you get it cheap.