Reviewed: April 21, 2005
Reviewed by: Matt Gonzales

Publisher
DreamCatcher Interactive

Developer
MC2

Released: April 6, 2005
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Mature

8
9
9
8
8.5

Supported Features:

Like other survival titles before it, you are in control of characters trapped in a world far from the comforts of home with enough dread and menace to rival a Haitian town meeting. Obscure plays out like an episode of One Tree Hill (no, I don't watch it, my girlfriend does) from its "emo music" opening right into the beginning scene that starts the game proper. This allows you, as the player, to discover the plot along with the characters. What unfolds is something like a cross between The Faculty and Resident Evil with a dash of Darkness Falls thrown in for ambiance.

Now we've all played a game like this at some point since the seminal Resident Evil made its auspicious debut on the PlayStation back in 1996. Back then, the stuff of B horror movies sent chills up the spines of eager gamers with a Romero-esque touch never before imagined on a game console. The problem is that the formula established in that title has been warmed over in approximately a boatload of bad games. Techniques gleaned from classic horror movies that were revolutionary back then are now considered prosaic at best.

Unlike games such as Silent Hill, which takes you to surreal locales scarcely seen outside of nightmares, Obscure keeps you in the very real location familiar to most gamers and a source of great horror, namely Leafmore High School. If you've ever seen The Faculty, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you've probably entertained the notion of sinister goings on after the sun goes down in the dark hallways of your local center of education; especially around report card time. I certainly found it more interesting than vampires at the prom.

The combat consists of little more than either brandishing a weapon (the usual guns, pipes, crowbars, what have you) or even some minor hand-to-hand action that won't be confused with any Tekken moves. But using light as a weapon in the form of the flashlight's beam, which can be boosted for short periods of time, or removing boards from windows to let in sunlight (in rather short supply as you would imagine) is an interesting enough angle in a tired genre. There is something to be said for a developer not afraid to take on industry giant id software's better wisdom by uniting the flashlight with the gun thanks to a roll of duct tape. How many of you wanted to do that in Doom 3?

Thankfully, as the PS2 nears the end of its life cycle, developers are finding ways to cut down on load times and that shows in Obscure even when going from one large area to the next using a variation of the classic through-the-door transitions of Resident Evil.

MC2 has done a fine job of rendering the locations of the haunted halls of Leafmore High School in a palette of blues, grays and browns while giving each of the detailed areas a believable amount of clutter and grime without laying it on too thick. Often games like this tend to be either too clean and cold like a museum or too gritty and nasty like the Silent Hill series. This place looks like a high school most of us attended, not too new, not too run down, but with suitably dreary emptiness in the half light that creeped us out whenever we found ourselves the last ones in the building at dusk.

The lighting in the game works very well, with nice touches to the flashlight and anywhere that light manages to stream in through cracks in walls, hatches, or boarded up windows. For a game that puts a great emphasis on light as a weapon, it was important that the developers not drop the ball on the luminance physics. I always enjoy playing with the flashlight in dark corners of rooms looking to see how shadows play or how different surfaces handle the reflections. While this is no Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 engine, it works well for what it is asked to do.

Animations however are a different thing. Most games of the genre suffer from stiff walking animations and Obscure is no different though I give them credit for giving each character a personality in their body language.

Every time you enter the next room, a door or gate swings shut behind the thief leading you forward into unknown areas of the school. All the while the music and sound effects get progressively moodier as the smile on your face gets wider. This is a horror movie playing out before you and you are the one in control. This is what all good games of the genre should do more often; set the mood and keep it going.

Without the benefit of secrets or collectibles - something that tends to take often takes away from the flow of a survival horror game – there is little reason to go back and complete it a second or third time.

The game's mechanics have you running around in control of a main character and a sub-character that can be given rudimentary commands. The co-operative mode simply lets a second player pick up another controller and play as that sub-character rather than have the somewhat sketchy AI handle them. This makes for a more interesting game but would have been much better as an online component with full voice support.

It's time this modern era of the Playstation 2 and Xbox for developers to quit making excuses and put online functionality into their games. If a second player can participate in a game, there's no reason that player shouldn't be able to do so from anywhere in the world via the Internet.

If nothing else, you can hardly pass up a game of this quality for a mere $20 on a shelf of games that often cost around $50 that provide less entertainment.

For a game that relies on teamwork and the use of light as a weapon, you can't go too wrong with a budget priced title that looks and sounds as good as this one even without the online component. Hell, this game is almost as scary as high school was.

*shiver*