It is becoming increasingly hard to play a good horror game. The last decent offering was Condemned on the Xbox 360 and before that the latest Resident Evil on the GameCube (and later PS2 and PC). Sure, there was a plethora of semi-decent releases on the PS2 just a year or two back, but other than the Silent Hill series most of these games never made it big outside of Japan. Surprisingly enough the first Obscure, a game marketed primarily at the western audience somehow managed to slip under the radar, even though it was just as good as the Silent Hill games and offered some unique takes on how horror games should be done.

Plants can kill you

In the original Obscure players were put in the shoes of several students who all fell victims to a plot made by a botany professor. Attempting to find a cure for his sick brother he unleashed mutant spores into the air, infecting everyone on the campus premises. The surviving students then worked their asses off to survive and put a stop to the madness. Keeping in mind that not many people played the original the authors were so kind as to make the intro movie tell most of what happened in the original. If this was Hollywood the first game would have ended with a menacing plant seed rolling into a small crack in the floor or something, but even so it is no surprise that the flora danger isn’t over.

Obscure 2 picks up 2 years after the original ended. Things on campus have returned to normal and nobody even remembers what happened just over 20 months ago. Corey and Mei, two of the many protagonists in the game are in their room, all excited about a party in a nearby college frat house. After a short introduction they both head off to a nearby dorm room, where several of their friends are hanging out. It doesn’t take long before they both give a new plant a try. Supposedly the entire campus has been making a tea out of it for the last couple of weeks, so it was time that they got on board as well. Not a minute later both Corey and Mei probably wish they never did drugs, as they both wake in a dark cemetery, filled with ominous shapes, getting glimpses of limbless creatures and worse.

This trip to the “void” doesn’t last long and they both return to the “real world” fairly quickly. Things are not as they were though. I won’t spoil more of the story, but via very short chapters you uncover the mystery behind the plant, realizing along the way that there is a deadly connection between the dream world and the real one.

One for all, all for one

From the get go players always control two characters and can freely switch between either by pressing a key. In combat sequences this isn’t much of a deal, as all of the characters act the same in combat. The AI of your companion is fairly decent, though you’ll often curse the fact that he won’t run away when in trouble (resulting in a game over screen when they die). Thankfully this isn’t much of a problem for the majority of the time. Outside of combat things change though. While Corey is good at acrobatics and can reach places his companion can’t, Sven a big student you meet later can move around objects that are otherwise too heavy to budge. The list doesn’t end there as the rest of the cast you gradually meet can pick locks, hack into computers and decrypt stuff. At first when the game chooses your pair of characters for you, you won’t have to do much thinking as switching between the two available students will be the only thing you can do. Later on however you will be able to select which two survivors you pair up, so things will become a bit more complicated. It never becomes annoying however, as you’ll always have a good idea who to use next.

Those of you who played Resident Evil Zero are probably cringing at the mention of not only two, but several playable characters. Thankfully the developers didn’t make the same mistakes the Resident Evil team did, so your characters share the inventory and equipping items is a breeze. Because of that you’ll never run out of ammo knowing that your companion is still carrying several clips. It might sound like a small thing on paper, but believe me when I say a flaw like this could have broken the game.

This is not Obscure

So far things haven’t changed much since the original, so it would be fair to have a look at the key differences. The most noticeable one is that the combat is a lot more action oriented. Light still plays a key role (you and your companion are equipped with flashlights), but you’ll mostly rely on blunt instruments and firearms to deal with the meat lumps that attack you. The weapons list is reasonably long with some very interesting stuff in there such as chainsaws and stun guns.

The save system also received an overhaul. You can no longer save wherever you want, as you are limited to the sparse save points found around the game. On one hand this does help with the intensity of the game, but only for the first or second retry. After dying more than twice you will know the locations of the enemies by heart, so the horror factor drops considerably. And although combat is enjoyable most of the time you’ll hate going through the same scenes over and over again just because you failed to anticipate an enemy’s jump from behind the wall.

The clunky camera doesn’t help here either. Even on the PS2 the game could do with a camera system overhaul, so things are pretty bad on the PC. You move your character around with the WASD combination while the mouse controls the camera. This is where things get hairy. In certain rooms you have free control over the camera, so the game plays like a 3rd person shooter. At other times the camera is locked in place though, so moving the mouse only turns the camera by a few degrees in each direction. To make things worse, the two systems sometime switch inside the same room. A perfect example of this can be found early in the game, where you are walking down a corridor until you reach a cross section. In the corridor moving the mouse only tilts the camera slightly, but a few steps away from the T-shaped cross the camera suddenly gets unlocked. This makes the system confusing at the best times and downright horrible the rest of the time. On a more positive sidenote, the PC port of the game was done fairly well – that is to say, the keyboard and mouse combo works surprisingly well. For some strange reason the developers didn’t feel it necessary to translate all the game text, so the game will often tell you to press the “X button”, which actually means the space bar.

Technically the game is solid, especially considering that it is a PS2 port. It won’t give your PC a run for its money, but the characters are detailed and thanks to the very small zones the level of detail found on the environments is high as well. We had some stability issues occasionally, but we were assured that this was because we were toying around with unfinished review code (supposedly it was the protection system’s fault). There is nothing unfinished about the audio in the game however, so hearing the cheesy voices of all the characters made us wish we were never born. Considering the rest of the sound effects were well done the detached voiceovers just didn’t fit in.

The game’s biggest selling point on all systems is the co-op gameplay however. At any moment a second player can join the game, taking control over your companion. On consoles this is a very straightforward thing, as all you have to do is plug a second controller in. On the PC things can get complicated though – it is possible to play the game on one keyboard, but the number of controls required to play the game just calls for a gamepad. We had no issues when we tried using a Logitech gamepad with the game. When playing with a friend a few issues crop up, but they are mainly limited to the two of you bumping into each other.

Conclusion

It’s been a while since a game came out that could genuinely scare us. Obscure II does a fairly good job of doing just that, though the original with its less action oriented gameplay did a better job. You’ll probably find the graphics outdated and the controls rigid. The sound effects will keep you on your toes, though it will be the voices of the characters that will send you screaming in horror. Overall the game offers enough to convince the diehard horror lovers, but falls short for the rest of the public.