When I picked up Obscure: The Aftermath, I saw it was a horror game but I wasn’t sure what kind I would get. This game has a classic B-movie setting that was worked to death in the 1980s– teenagers stuck in a very hopeless situation in a remote area of middle America, with scary monsters trying to kill them. The fact that this setting turns out to be in a video game is a big plus for me.

The setting of Obscure shows a lot of college students doing some really dumb things, like turning a black flower into a very interesting drug. Most of these students are either smoking it, snorting it, or putting it in their tea. This is not the best thing if you’re trying to live to see the end of the game, but we still have morons doing this even though movies have told us that it’s a bad idea. Oh, and by the way, every student who uses this drug turns into a big scary monster.

You play a total of nine characters, which seems rather large, but each has his or her own special ability, like moving heavy objects, scaling walls, or hacking into computer locks. Also, you can play two-player mode in the storyline, which is one of the best aspects of the game. Throughout this mode you’ll have to pick certain characters to do missions, but you have a good amount of free choice.

Let’s talk monsters now. By this day and age we’ve seen it all, from vampires to zombies and even demons from hell. So after this realization I didn’t care what they were, I cared about how good they looked, and in this game they looked like crap. Half of the time I couldn’t tell what I was fighting, let alone find it scary.

Now we come to my favorite part of this game– the weapons. The rules, of course, are very traditional as I pointed out earlier. You drink, you die; you have sex, you die. This goes hand in hand with the weapons, most of which are blunt instruments, but you also get the classic pistol or shotgun.

But this isn’t a military armory, so the ammo is limited to a few clips each level and a handful of what else you can find. Most of the weapons you will find yourself using are baseball bats, hockey sticks, and a golf club. There are few times when you can use electric weapons like a chainsaw or stun gun.

In Obscure, for every plus there is a minus, which became a problem for me. Give this game a try if you want to play a different type of horror movie.

Tags: survival_horror

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