I have a somewhat shameful admission: I un-ironically really like The Faculty. If you check out of this blog right then and there, I don't blame you, but let me be clear: I know The Faculty isn't particularly good in terms of raw movie quality. I like the movie because it creates an absurd horror scenario that is very small scale, told from the perspective of a teenage ensemble, and that despite the fact it can be snarky or occasionally tell jokes, the movie overall is not actually meant to be funny. The body snatchers conspiracy in Harrington High School is played straight, it's trying to be legitimately scary, not slapstick, and it wants you to take its somewhat immature main characters seriously as they survive the ensuing days.
That juxtaposition, of an inherently silly main scenario, told with deadly seriousness, is something not done enough. So why am I rambling about a horror movie from the 90s?
Video games are my preferred entertainment medium, so I'm somewhat saddened by the fact that, unlike a lot of other mediums, there's actually very little teen horror in this business, let alone young adult horror that is told seriously or even just told well at all. Teen movies are a dime a dozen, whole channels are built on the concept of teenage entertainment on television, and Goosebumps is a classic go-to example of scary stories for children, but in video games, there's not really an equivalent amount at all. In fact, the only example of this I can think of lately is up-coming PS4 exclusive Until Dawn, a game about a group of friends who cross paths with a serial killer while on vacation. As high hopes as I have for it, I doubt it'll set the world on fire.
Obscure is an example of this highly specific kind of story that I missed out on back in the day. Originally released in late-2004 in Europe, the game centers around Leafmore High and a group of students locked in their creepy school overnight. Ashley's boyfriend Kenny has gone missing, and its up to a small group of friends to find him. Be still my beating heart.
This game did ______ before ______ was a thing.
Anyone remember when Heavy Rain was on the scene, and one of the biggest things touted about it was that it was a very malleable narrative that responded to the player's failures, but didn't outright end because of them? How losing a character meant other characters would naturally swerve into those story beats themselves, instead? Unfortunately Heavy Rain didn't exactly pull that off all that well, but it struck me while playing Obscure that this game totally does that concept in a way that isn't shit and keeps things from becoming overly convoluted.
Being an ensemble cast, you can change characters at the press of a button, each bringing something special to the table. Ashley is a tough girl, so she does more damage with weapons. Josh is an aspiring journalist, giving him greater observational skills that allow him to tell you if there's anything left to pick up in the room. Shannon wants to be a doctor, so she heals better. Kenny is an athelete, so he can sprint. Stan is a slacker, who can pick locks way better than the rest of them. But more importantly, and more relevant to the point I was getting at in the above paragraph, when a character dies, there's no game over. The story continues without them, merely switching control to another character, and necessitating a trip back to your group's gathering point to grab another partner.
What makes this play out so well in the story is that, whoever the player character is is the person who takes center in story cutscenes and events. Those cutscenes aren't baked in; they're dependent on who you're playing as, so any scene can subtly change depending on who you're controlling, or who is no longer alive. The game only ends if all the kids die.
Oh, and how I mentioned the partner thing? Obscure is a fully two-player cooperative horror game years before that became, for good or ill, a de-facto standard.
As the story progresses, you eventually come across Kenny trapped in what is a series of secret laboratories underneath the school and uncover more of the conspiracy that surrounds the school's upper-administration. I won't delve too deep into the story bits as, par for the course in this genre, it's fairly thin to begin with so if you're at all interested you should just experience it yourself. One bit I will poke at, however, is that the crux of the evil monsters is that they're developed from a creepy evil flower harvested from Africa (*cough*) and one of the attributes of said flower is that it creates a black corruption in its subjects. This affects the environment, and makes the enemies incredibly sensitive to light. Crank your flashlight up to a higher setting and you can weaken enemies before inflicting killing blows. Alan Wake came out over 5 years after Obscure, and that was that game's whole damn gimmick. To add salt in the wound, in Obscure, you also don't have to collect stupid batteries. Suck a D, Alan.
Obscure is a blast from Survival Horror Past with a lot of little touches I really enjoy.
There was a recent Jimquisition titled "We Need More Spencer Mansions" that talked about how the idea of a very small-scale setting, replete with individual rooms, hidden areas, meaningful backtracking, all connected with a consistent design aesthetic, as being something of a lost art. After playing Obscure, I can't help but think more than ever that this is true. That sort of environment creates an incredible sense of intimacy, of knowing the environment inside and out, that allows horror games especially to play with expectations and lull you into thinking you know the game better than it does. It draws you in much moreso than a bunch of disconnected themed areas that you trot through once, never to return, as if it's a theme park ride.
Obscure takes place exclusively in a High School. And that's okay. Rad, even. In fact, Obscure draws loads inspiration from its survival horror predecessors. One example of this: You pick up CDs that serve as your save items, meaning your saves are very much limited in a similar style to the ink ribbons of Resident Evil.
Yet, despite borrowing a lot of design decisions and clearly being inspired by the classic survival horror games of the era, Obscure takes the edge off of some of the most frustrating bits. Though you aim and fire in a manner incredibly similar to Resident Evil, you can move and shoot. There are fixed camera angles, but they pan along with you, and the enemies typically surround themselves in a black aura that spreads around them as they move through the environment, so you don't have the Resident Evil problem of running around a corner right into the loving embrace of a zombie. There are also three different "gathering points" that you can fast travel to to quickly move to the center of the larger area, making running over to another building of the school less of a hassle than backtracking typically can be.
Add to that other little stylistic choices that are small, but I appreciate as nice touches. There's little situational dialogue depending on the characters. There's more environment interactivity than you typically get in a survival horror game. You can use sticky tape to attach various flashlights you collect in the game to different weapons (lolDoom3) so you don't have to choose between one or the other. When your character is picking a lock, the AI companion will immediately stand guard behind you with his or her weapon at the ready to protect from interruptions. When running past chairs you brush them out of the way. The boys can push heavy objects faster than the girls can. You can bust open glass doors to reach through and unlock them or bust open windows so the light shining through stuns the enemies. Monster Energy is a healing item.
I'm also a stickler for good footstep noises in horror games (seriously, it's a really important thing you guys), and Obscure passes the test.
There are so many small things to like about Obscure, and it is yet another reminder that despite the common talking point that "there's something out there for everyone!" there really is nothing like this being made anymore in this style.
However, being something of a European Special, the production is weird in spots.
The development team behind Obscure was located in France, and unfortunately, it shows. Documents scattered through the environment will often have really awkward prose and strange word choices, the voice acting for about half the characters is incredibly stilted, almost as if English was not the native language of the people coaching the voice actors, and even certain item names will just be straight-up misleading.
An example of this mid-way through the game is when you're first given grenades, useful against the "Stage 3 Mutants" that are large hulking beasts which, in groups of more than one, can easily kill a character off. The odd thing about them is that these weapons are referred to as "Light Grenades" which made me think of it as something it wasn't. You would assume, perhaps, that these things were one of many different forms of grenades, and you would find grenades with heavier damage or a larger blast radius down the line, but no. What Obscure refers to as a "Light Grenade" is really just a flash grenade, or a flash-bang. I would think this was just victim of literal translating, but when I asked a french-speaking friend, he referred to such grenades as "dazzle grenades" so I don't understand how that naming convention happened.
Soundtrack-wise, the music is bizarre and doesn't fit the mood in any way whatsoever. The music was largely performed by the children's choir of the Paris Opera which I just straight-up don't understand as a creative choice. Later in the game the music becomes more distorted and remixed, which better fits, but a more appropriate choice would've been to restrict the music to non-vocal tracks.
There are also some weird gameplay imperfections that crop up from time to time. Obscure uses a sort of Metal Gear Solid-esque inventory system, by pressing down shoulder buttons and cycling through a list of items on the right (weapons) or the left (general use items). This normally works fine, and is actually sort of a novel fit for the genre, but you collect a lot of general purpose items along the way, and story progress items like keys, or boltcutters, aren't used automatically. This is a bit annoying, because Resident Evil solved that problem ages before, and scrolling through a dozen items in the heat of the moment is clumsy.
Animations can also be a bit spazzy, and characters just sort of unceremoniously flop to the ground upon death, with basically no fanfare whatsoever. The latter issue wouldn't be so bad, if the game made it more clear exactly how damaged each character was without having to go into the menu to check their portraits. For a game so forward-thinking in other areas, these are odd missteps.
In general, though, Obscure was a pleasant surprise for me, and I really liked it.
I grew up on three kinds of games as a kid, more than any others: Console RPGs, survival horror games, and strategy games, with the occasional import. A Nintendo Kid I was not.
As such, it does sort of warm my heart to have a game like this be genuinely good. A game that abides by a design that everyone threw in the trash to chase after Resident Evil 4's success. I took a brief glimpse at Obscure 2, out of curiosity for what was to come, and it sadly did what every game of those years did: Saw that Resident Evil 4 was massively successful in-part because of a behind-the-back camera and thought "let's just throw that in our game and change nothing else and we'll do better, yay!" like the lazy thinking that pervades all too much game development. I will surely play through that someday soon as well, and I hold out hope there is a certain je ne sais quoi about it, too.
Because there is still something special to be made in design like Obscure's. I've never believed that it's an invalid design, simply different. It reminds me a lot of when polygonal graphics rose up and everyone looked at 2D graphics and thought "Pff, why would I play this silly outdated nonsense? Everything about the hottest and latest trends are categorically superior!" and later, 2D games found their place, not as something archaic and outdated, but as something we can still do fun and interesting things with if we really try.
Obscure is a game that, if you hold fondness for the pre-RE4 era of Survival Horror, or teen horror movie camp, you should check into. (Paging @yummylee!) It costs only seven dollars on Steam, can run on a potato at this point, and cleans up nicely. Like any good horror game, it doesn't outstay its welcome, easily completed inside 5 hours or so, with a fair amount of replay value. You don't have much to lose by trying.
If-I-had-to-give-it-a-rating-I-guess: 4/5 |
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