A light and fast survival horror game, teen slasher style.
One important thing to be noticed in Obscure is that it’s not meant to be a serious and strong emotional game with sad stories and such. It takes the teen-slasher approach to horror, focusing more on high adrenaline scares than on psychological subtle fear.
Obscure allows you to control up to 2 from 5 teenagers trapped in a school with a dark past. The prologue introduces some of the game’s main mechanics and gives you some background on the schools dark horrors. When the actual storyline starts, you already know what awaits the innocent teenagers.
The school itself is very detailed and brooding. The library and the parking lot are awfully familiar to me and the whole place feels like a real school. Ok, it’s a bit too shaggy and dark but what would you expect in a horror game? Light effects are more detailed than the rest but it’s surely because light plays in important role against the creatures that lurk in your school.
The characters are stereotypical teenagers but well detailed models. They all possess some unique ability that will help you throughout the game. One of ‘em can find any hidden items in a given room, the other is the fighter and one actually offers advice on how to proceed in game etc. Those are minor tweaks and not necessary for any of the game puzzles, I’d suggest you pick up the character you like most in terms of appearance and move on.
All teenagers move fast through the rooms and actually stumble upon every piece of furniture, well, at least I did, the fixed camera was not well placed in some of the scenarios and that prevented me from better exploring a given room or finding an item.
I liked most of the puzzles. They’re not so simple and not mind-bending as well. A nice feature is that your character marks the puzzle on the map with a question mark until you can come up with a solution to it.
Another nice touch on the game is light. You’ll soon discover that light can affect monsters in this game so there are a few situations where the scenario plays an important role in the battle. Not to spoil anyone’s fun, lemme just say that the game loses much once night draws in.
During the game, you can select up to 2 characters from your team of 5 to explore the school. If you wish, you can invite a friend to control the second character. What surprised me most in Obscure is that all this simplicity in character development is intentional because every character is expandable. I was ambushed in one of the rooms by a large number of monsters and one of my characters died. I expect the game over screen but the game went on! I went back and picked up another partner … the game moved on! Further down the road I lost yet another character to an instant death scene and the final boss made one extra victim. So only 2 out of 5 characters survived the ordeal.
Instead of focusing on a dark past or emotional background, Obscure creates a horror situation for 5 kids to survive. That’s the most distinct feature in Obscure, it’s meant to be taken lightly.
I’d say Obscure succeeded in creating a nice background with very good but sometimes misplaced music. The game is maybe a tad too fast and characters are a bit too, whoever intentional, simplistic. Their reaction to chaos and fear is the same to mine when I find out there’s no coffee left.
Not everything is goofy in Obscure, there are some nice pictures, diaries and one particular notebook you find at the end of the game that summarizes the whole background in a nice movie, there are some good boss fights as well (the final boss is a very interesting enemy in both design and fighting AI) and some nice touches here and there. I’d say it’s good enough for a first try.