Retro Recall: Obscure – A nightmare called school

Some games are criminally underrated, especially when the critical response is lukewarm, and a game fails to get the recognition it deserves. Obscure is a good example, considering that its teen horror flick feel didn’t quite resonate with videogame critics.

Screw critics. With the due exception of yours truly, of course.

Word of mouth is and always will be the best way of sharing your loved games with your friends, and Obscure did manage to sell a few copies to warrant a sequel. Often compared to the 1998 movie The Faculty, the setting is Leafmore High School, and you’ll take control of a group of five students. These are heavily stereotyped and the whole atmosphere is far from the most creative ever designed, but Obscure manages to be original despite all of this.

Obscure is one of the most derivative and original horror games ever created. No, you’ve read it right, this is not a typo. Read on.

One of the strengths of Obscure is the setting, your average high school. There is nothing innovative about that, you’ve all been there and know the environment fairly well. By placing the player in a milieu that he already knows so well, the game makes do without unnecessary lore and boring mise en scène. It’s all about you and a familiar place, your friends and the mysterious disappearances that are taking place.

Obscure plays out as a third person survival horror game that could be the hell spawn of the first Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, featuring a campy story, five teens and some cool, grotesque plant monsters. You have the jock, the cheerleader, the stoner, the school reporter and the brainy girl, each one with a specific set of skills (healing, extra damage, lockpicking and so on).

There are a couple of highlights in Obscure that makes it stand out from the competition. First and foremost, there’s a two-player cooperative mode in the same screen. You can play the entire adventure with a friend or just let the AI do its best to control the second character, and you can switch between them whenever you wish. The other nice detail is the fact that a few of your colleagues may die for good during the game, but as long as you keep a couple of them alive, you can still reach the ending. Not exactly a common recurrence for a horror game released in 2004.

Obscure strikes a nice balance between exploration, puzzle solving and combat. It’s also clever in the way that light is used in the game, as the monsters are vulnerable to it – probably not the biggest fans of sunny beaches and tanning salons. The option to attach a flashlight to your gun is welcome, and now and then you can even break some windows to let the sunlight invade the room and kill some monsters.

The control scheme can be a bit iffy, especially in rooms where the camera is fixed in a particular viewpoint. However, it’s worth battling against to experience the joys of this teen slasher high school drama.

Hydravision Entertainment is the name of the French studio that was trying to get a piece of the survival horror pie. Obscure and its sequel were received with some mixed reviews, but the sales apparently weren’t that bad, and the team moved on to develop inferior PS2 and Wii versions of the overly-ambitious and extremely flawed Alone in the Dark reboot.

Later, after changing their name to Mighty Rocket Studio, they developed an Obscure spin-off called Final Exam. This is a cartoonish side-scroller that really had anything to do with Obscure apart from featuring students and a high school. It was later revealed that the studio was developing a new Obscure game, but it shut down in 2015, squandering our hopes.

The realistic, slowly-decaying setting is one of Obscure’s strong points. The school is nicely detailed and offers enough variety to keep you engrossed, and the way that the rooms change with a Silent Hill-like vibe is creepy enough. The story is nicely paced and while it’s not that challenging or lengthy, the first playthrough is filled with interesting findings.

I loved Obscure’s familiarity. It felt like something that was formulaic yet refreshing at the same time. I also liked the campiness of it, with your typical students and their utterly redundant remarks or lame one-liners. Some of these facets may come from the “so bad it’s good” category, but Obscure is far from a bad game; in fact, it was quite bold for its time.

Obscure isn’t exactly grade A material, but it definitely gets a B+ for effort.

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