ObsCure

obscure is completely inspired by early resident evil and B movies. the voice acting and story must be extremely corny and cliche on purpose. its just a highschool with a mysterious undertone of something gone wrong. theres 5 characters you can play from and they have slight diffeerences i guess?

you also play with 2 characters, one you control and the other AI (or coop partner)

theres a special ability button and one of the short hair girls has an ability that tells you exactly what you should be doing, so i mostly used her so I don't wander around aimlessly.

the other abilities are like, one guy can lockpick otherwise secret doors, another guy can sprint, the black girl is good with guns (???) or something, and the other guy tells you if theres anything left in the room.

mostly just used the short hair girl (Tells current objective) and sprint guy
so what do you do? well it takes all its hints straight from resident evil 1-3.
and there is permadeath, so if any of these 5 characters die, they are gone for good. its best to just reload a save if anyone dies. unfortunately there are "Gotcha!" stupid scripted moments like an elevator falling ontop of you unless you do a sequence just right, and thats how I lost one of my guys permanently.


youre in a school, with a sort of hub zone in the court yard (you can press a button to warp here at any time infact)
in this school, like RE fasion, theres items you must collect, doors you must unlock, puzzles to solve, and enemies to avoid or kill. probably the best thing about the game is the level design and the atmosphere
the combat is nothing special but its not tank controls. its modern 3d style control, but I played with keyboard only.
Theres no mouse support. so the pc port is pretty shit, i should of used controller but whatever.

so , for the combat it mostly comes down to either baiting the enemy into swinging at you, then running past
or what i did most of the time: just killing them.
it seems there is actually enough ammo in this game to pretty much kill every monster you come across and still do fine for it. its not that stressful in that sense.

i was never completely out of ammo or struggling despite pretty much killing every monster i came across.
for the first hour or 2 you have melee weapons which suck and you always take damage but after that it gets better.
theres not that much in the way of weapons i found, theres standard pistols, a shotgun, a revolver that i never got to use, and a laser (only 1 load of ammo, use for last boss)

theres apparently some flashlight mechanic where if you hold a button it makes enemies weaker or something? i could never really figure it out. or if I did figure it out, I didn't notice it helping too much.

the controls are prety shit but i didnt use a controller like I was suppose to. its keyboard only with annoying inentory system where you hold button and scroll through items (Q for items E for weapons) and more oftne than not found myself fumbling around infront of enemies fighting with the controls working against me than for me most of the time.

so thats combat and mechanics. whats left?

well the atmosphere is crazy. theres constantly really bizarre wacky chanting music playing and totally loud insane screams of people in random places its totally oddball. you'll enter a basic looking room and just start hearing babies screeching or people screaming at top of their lungs. at first you start freaking out thinking youre in danger, but its just the ambience.

the graphics are early 2000s but with good use of fixed camera angles RE style. no complaints and the right amount of grit and disgusting stuff all over the place, darkness, etc. monster designs are totally insane and bizarre too.

the save system is with limited CD items like RE, but you can use them anywhere you want. and there are a few times where i kind of 'save scummed' where you save getting into a dangerous place, and re-play the event multiple times until you get desired outcome.

there are a lot of "are you fucking kidding me?" stupid moments where theres just too many monsters coming at you, or you fall through the floor and instantly die, or you walk half across the entire map and realize you had to walk 1 step in the other direction to originally trigger a cutscene etc. found myself getting pretty frustrated and annoyed at certain points, not because it was challenging or i was failing to do something, but just because of poor design and trial and error.

like these stupid 'boss' enemies that just sit on the floor and shoot maggots at you and you have to bait him into swinging to tire him out then just pelt him with shotgun bullets. i dont know, that shit happens like 5 times and its lame every time.

something that knocked off enjoyment was that you have to collect 4 statues for the end of the game, and I missed one of them. and there was no direction of where I had missed one.
"There is another statue outside the dungeon, I know it!"
well that means it could be anywhere in the entire game. so what do i do? i had to look up a walkthrough, and none of them were useful. i had to watch youtube videos for about an hour before i found where the statue i missed was. not fun.

well after I did that and got through the ending boss fight (which took a dozen attempts) i got the bad ending because one of my guys died in a scripted event. its ok, not much difference in the bad ending just slightly different cutscene. and i'm left feeling like i've completed a corny, yet memorable, campy b-horror type game that didn't seem to take its self too seriously. but unforunately the controls, and some bullshit moments and slightly underwhelming combat doesn't make this a home run or anything for me. its a cool spinoff for people who have already played a lot of classic resident evil, and for that it was a decent experience

6.5/10

Legitimately fresh tone, setting and concept for the time, with a decent attempt at placing co-op in survival leading to the honestly great mechanic of the game continuing after a student's death, with a bit of a zombie twist to dead students as well, Obscure is kitschy horror fun and provides some decent puzzle and exploration moments alongside some seriously busted combat, camera and inventory management, and a concept about killing creatures with daylight that becomes moot an hour in as the rest of the game takes place at nightfall.

EDIT: Uhhh...I guess the setting is still kind of cool and there are a few cool puzzle moments, but not nearly enough to highlight how paper thin the rest of the mechanics are, especially the co-op which could have been so much more. I also forgot just how barren the story is; you know who the villain is and his entire backstory in like 20 minutes if you glance at a mere two notes. I can't say it's much worse than the B-grade horror games of today, but it would be a stretch to call Obscure a diamond in the rough.