April 22, 2005 - Something is not quite right at Leafmore High. Awful screams are being heard. Students are disappearing. Teachers may suspect something but do nothing. Other students, obviously suffering from MTV attention span disorder, don’t seem to notice either. Then, after basketball practice one night, Kenny Matthews goes missing. His sister Shannon and her friends, who have nothing better to do on a school night, lock themselves in the school and try to discover what is truly happening at Leafmore (Oh, and try to find Kenny too!). Obviously the S.T.A.R.S. team was already on assignment elsewhere and that’s why we are left with O.C. rejects as substitutes for real Survival Horror heros.

Let me state for the record that Obscure does nothing wrong. It is a quality title, sold at a bargain price, that offers solid gameplay, beautifully rendered and intricately realistic graphics, a very mature audio score, a completely competent game engine that loads quickly and a map feature that is quite useful. Obscure simply doesn’t innovate enough for anyone who’s been to Raccoon City or Silent Hill to care. The one new feature that it does bring to the table is co-op play, and while it is quite clever, it may not be enough for survival horror fans to warrant a visit to Leafmore.

Survival horror games generally follow the following principle: a lone human is forced to battle hordes of generally un-dead zombie-type creatures in the hopes of I) saving the world, II) rescuing a loved one or III) finding the root of Dr. Phil’s popularity and putting an end to it once and for all. While several of these games, most notably the Resident Evil series, have given us multiple characters to play through the game with, never have we been given multiple characters to use at the same time. And herein lies the first of Obscure’s distinctions. A lone human against hordes of tongue-swinging saliva-spewing un-dead zombie-types is one thing, but having two characters against a few smallish poor-excuse-for-a-monster-type-monsters really doesn’t require as many “survival” skills and doesn’t really constitute anything very “horrific”.

The gameplay follows the traditional third person survival horror mechanics. A thumbstick moves your character around in 3D (no more early Resident Evil” mummy controls” here). The right trigger locks you into an enemy or lifts your gun/flashlight to the ready while the left trigger enables you to “boost” the beam of your flashlight, allowing you to dispel the black halo surrounding certain creatures (making them easier to finish off with a bat or bullets). The A button is used to swing your bat, shoot various guns or use different objects. The X and B buttons control object and weapon inventories while the Y button enables each character’s special aptitude.

Another feature that Hydravision attempted to incorporate into Obscure was special aptitudes for each of its cookie-cutter 90210 characters. These range from having the sexually repressed nerdy girl give out clues about the next step, the Jasmine Guy (in full-on Whitley Gilbert mode) character double-shooting weapons, the Josh Hartnett wannabee (with the god-awful skater dude voice) able to pick locks quicker than the other characters, the creepy newspaper geek telling you when you’ve forgotten to pick up an item in a particular room and the missing boy, Kenny, Hulking up; running faster, hitting harder and being more resilient. The special aptitudes of the controlled character can be accessed using the Y button, but your partner’s aptitudes can also be used by using the d-pad. All in all, these are helpful, sometimes even a little too much.

The map is also quite useful, always indicating which doors can be accessed and the next location of interest. But this spoon feeding soon takes its toll. The game is too easy and too short. The puzzles are practically nonexistent, the bullets are plentiful, and you are never left seriously stranded wondering what to do next. In fact, when you have exhausted the things to do at a particular location (Admin Building, Sick Bay, Amphitheater, Dining Hall, Dorm, Library, etc) a helpful little menu will pop up and ask you if you’d like to return to the “gathering point” where your other friends are waiting. This is a nice feature, but sometimes you’d like to wander around a building and explore it fully and surmise for yourself that there is nothing of interest left.