Obscure Review (PC)

  Do you remember Resident Evil? Do you remember the Resident Evil knock offs that followed in it's footsteps and oversaturated the survival horror genre to extinction? How about the teenage high school horror movies that came out around the same time? If you do, then you know what to expect with Obscure. It's exactly what you think it is, and it's a pretty funny nostalgia trip, too.

  I won't say Obscure is “good”, but I'll recommend it anyway with a few stipulations. Firstly, coming in at the tail end of the tank control era allows it to be surprisingly playable by modern standards. The controller mapping is certainly strange; you hold LB/RB to bring up your inventory options and cycle through them with the right stick, holding the action button to bring up commands. It's unique to say the least, but once you get the hang of it it works functionally as well as any other control scheme I guess. You also can have a second character that's either controlled by the AI or by a second player. I didn't try it cooperatively, but the AI works very well for the most part. The second player is optional, but serious kudos for including that feature and making it work much better than the disaster I expected.

  The story and setting is very generic; you control a half dozen high school students whose principal is hiding a dark secret and conducting genetic experiments on the student body in his mad scientist lab underneath the school yard. As stated: Resident Evil plus any '90s high school horror movie paints an accurate picture. It's all very small scale; the school and the underground tunnels make up the entirety of the environments you'll be exploring, and it's a short game that won't challenge you with brain teasers or difficult combat/resource management. In fact, I found trying to avoid enemies useless, and (on Normal, anyway) you seem required to pump bullets into every John Carpenter's The Thing enemy you come across to progress.

  As copy-and-paste as Obscure is in design, there are a few noteworthy innovations that were well ahead of their time. The co-op is now a staple of modern survival horror games like the newer Resident Evils and Dead Space. Also, I thought the main combat mechanic of Alan Wake (shining a flashlight on darkness-covered monsters before you shot them) was a fresh concept... Obscure features this exact same loop and it came out five years prior. Sure, Alan Wake is a much better game, but Obscure should get credit where credit is due. Another fun tidbit: Until Dawn made a big hoopla about main characters dying but the story continuing without them. Obscure did it a decade earlier. You can swap between the six kids at will. They each have unique special abilities, and if they die they're gone. You then have to find the spot they died to collect any weapons they were carrying ala Dark Souls. Again, not saying Obscure is a great game, but much respect for being way ahead of the curve.

  The main reason I came away from Obscure with a positive outlook is because it's hilariously bad. It's B-movie cheese at it's finest, with CGI cutscenes and stereotypical dialogue that's just too unintentionally funny to pass up. As far as survival horror games of it's ilk go it's not nearly as offensively archaic as most, so you're left with a short highlight reel of what makes those games so good/bad. With the right sense of humor and appreciation for the genre, Obscure is definitely worth a look for the stoner kid's lines alone.