ObsCure II

As someone who doesn't have a lot of affinity for the original in hindsight but never got the chance to play the sequel until now, this game is worse than Obscure 1 in just about every way. The creepy kids choir returns but with a lot of extraneous instrumentation on top. The co-op returns, but with an even worse camera system and a super stingy inventory that makes the prospect of co-op play nauseating. But the AI in single player is some of the worst I've encountered, with no real eye for threat assessment, ammo conservation or natural aid in puzzles. While it does have a couple of neat two-man puzzles, a lot of them are based on simply gating progress behind bringing the right party with you, making it a far more linear experience than last time. Despite that, I still got turned around a lot because of unclear objectives and bad scripting. Without the high school glue tying everything together and making the setting cohesive, the game jumps from one limp setpiece to another, and what backtracking there is feels very uninspired. It's a game where everything about the direction is shallow but the mechanics still aren't up to snuff. A fun assortment of weapons and a few cool puzzles save the gameplay from being a shitshow, but it is very close.

And while the original Obscure is also pretty bad narrative-wise, Aftermath somehow makes the original look like Signalis. The original spoiled its villain too early; the sequel's villains appear and disappear at random and don't make a lot of sense. The move to humanise our party during gameplay with flexible dialogue options would help to make each member stand out, if not for the dialogue being just as badly translated as before, with a heaping dose of college douchebaggery on top. It's one of the horniest games I've played, which does feel like a deliberate throwback to old slashers with a conservative message. There are some strong anti-drug and anti-sex messages in here and it's sort of playful about it, until you get to the Cronenberg body horror brought on by a heavily implied monster rape. Considering how confusing the rest of the climax is, why make that the only clear part? It's nuts.

There's a tiny bit of inventiveness in Obscure 2, and it's less of a Silent Hill knock-off...but it's also just less of everything except the runtime. Again, it's not much worse than some horror shovelware we get these days, but it approaches Remothered 1 levels of tedium and tastelessness.