The events unfold as if within a dream, each scene having almost no relationship to prior events. The plot involves monsters, suicide, rape, murder, and drug use, and yet manages to avoid making any of these themes significant. But they missed their mark if Resident Evil is a B Horror movie, Obscure 2 is some grade significantly lower (I’m thinking ‘Z’). I get what the game designers were going for, I really do they were trying to hit that vibe captured by so many Grade B teenage slasher films, where the characters die off one by one until only the romantic couple (or final girl) remain. The story is vile in many respects: it is contrived, poorly written, and at times offensive. One thing that persists from the previous game is the generic monster designs the monsters themselves are no better than those in the previous game, which isn’t a good thing.īut the biggest problem with Obscure 2 by far is its story. Instead, Obscure 2 is a pretty linear romp through a series of unlikely locales which eventually loop back on themselves. And unlike the previous game, none of the characters can die during game play. On a couple of occasions you can select the members of your team, but for the most part the game forces specific characters upon you. Gone are all the interesting mechanics from the first Obscure: no more taping flashlights to guns, no more high-beam strategy, no more breaking windows to give yourself the edge. The real problems lay in game design direction that the game designers took. So there are a few technical issues, but nothing game-destroying. And those bastard game designers put a lock picking puzzle between a save and a boss–but now I’m getting ahead of myself again. I think I probably spent as much time trying to pick locks as I did playing the rest of the game it’s not that there are that many locks to pick, it’s just that each one would take me ~40 frustrating minutes to complete. I beat the game but I never was able to decipher how the lock pick minigame was supposed to work the pick seems to move on its own, and I couldn’t grok the mapping between 2D cursor coordinates and the aiming of the pick. Shooting was kind of a nightmare you need to use three separate buttons to lock on and shoot (seriously? 3 buttons? come on, guys!), and it was such a pain that I usually just gave all the guns to the AI player (I couldn’t convince anybody to play this thing with me two-player). I spent good portions of the game with the camera spinning around in circles because the Wiimote wasn’t pointed exactly at the screen. On the technical side, the use of the Wii cursor to control the camera is, in my mind, a total failure. Obscure 2 has a bunch of problems, and while some of them are technical, most of them are design problems. OK, now that we’ve gotten that part out of the way, let’s get down to business. And the Obscure series is still the only horror game series that allows two players at once, which is pretty cool. It’s also kind of cool that the game splits its large cast up and follows different pairs of characters independently that seems like a good way to keep the environments and play mechanics fresh without forcing the story to zigzag. There’s also a pretty nice dream sequence at the beginning of the game that is presented with a level of skill not evident in the rest of the title. There’s a section where you need to row a boat by moving the Wiimote and Nunchuck to manipulate the oars, and I liked that section in particular. I played through the Wii version of Obscure 2 (it’s also available for PS2 and PC), and I thought that most of the Wii controls worked pretty well, including the gesture-based moves. Combat is extremely routine but serviceable, and the soundtrack isn’t half bad (I particularly liked the Main Menu music). I like the half-cartoony art style and the in-game art is very nice. Actually, the technical execution of Obscure 2–the graphics, control scheme, etc–seems pretty ok. Before I get into some of the reasons that Obscure 2 is a shitty game, let’s take a second and talk about the parts that I thought were ok. It’s atrocious on almost every level, far worse than its predecessor, and it took significant effort to see the game through to the end. Which is why I was somewhat surprised to find Obscure 2 to be a huge pile of elephant dung. The first Obscure also had some interesting mechanics involving the use of light to combat enemies, and though the content itself was a bit generic, the game was pretty well put together. Its saving grace was its two player mode, something that has still yet to be duplicated by any other console horror game to date. The original Obscure was a fun, if somewhat routine, horror game. The worst aspects of a teenage slasher flick in game form: boring, trite, and occasionally offensive.
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