Obscure is, at its core, an attempt to remake the Kevin Williamson teenage horror movies of the mid 90's in a video game form. For those of you that don't know Williamson, he was the man behind such franchises as "Scream", "I Know What You Did Last Summer", and even "Dawson's Creek". Teenage horror flicks were his bread and butter. Obscure takes Williamsons' formula and applies it to the survival horror genre. It's a natural pairing. Obscure's story revolves around several attractive teenagers that find themselves trapped inside of a school that, conveniently, is a place of dark dealings and creepy crawlies. You can fill in the rest of the story from what I've told you if you know anything about these movies. The story is formulaic, but it is supposed to be. One of the surprising things about this game is how the story actually changes depending on how well you do in the game. I inadvertently got one of my characters killed in the introduction, so I never saw a cut sequence that most other players did. There are also multiple endings to the game depending on what level of difficulty you beat it.

When I was going through the game, I was quite surprised about how nice the game looked and how the visuals worked hand in hand with the ambient sounds to provide you with a truly creepy experience. The whole school had an art deco look to it that gave it the impression of something that was very old; and the drab nature of all the wall textures were enough to make you swear that you could actually smell the mildew through your monitor. As you traveled along, you would hear the crunching of broken glass as some unseen creature made its way through the halls of the school. I applaud Hydravision for getting the gestalt creepiness of their game down pat. However, that is almost a requirement for the genre. All survival horror games look and sound nice, but Obscure goes one step further.

Obscure actually makes sense. There are puzzles, but they are not annoying travel across the whole game world to pick up a widget that opens the gargoyle's goiter type puzzles. The solution is normally within arm's reach, and if not, then it is on the same level as you. This is a stark contrast to Japanese survival horror games, which try their best to defy all logic and reason with their puzzles. Obscure continues to turn the genre on its ear by adding the ability to play with a friend. By simply plugging in a gamepad, a friend can take control of your companion and help you fend off the things that go bump in the night. Sadly, though, the gamepad is a requirement to play the game in co-op mode. This flaw is because Obscure was designed for both the PC and Console market.

The cross-platform nature of Obscure is something that hurts it on the PC, in my opinion. The game completely ignores the mouse as an input tool, which makes navigating the windows a tedious task at times. And that's not counting when you cannot figure out the mislabeled commands in the menus. The game could have been made leaps and bounds better had a little more attention been paid to make it specialized for the PC. As it is now it feels very akin to playing a game on an emulator.

Obscure's combat system could also use some attention. Combat is very sloppy. This is partially due to the very close and confining camera angles, and partially due to the clumsy nature of the targeting system. In combat I often found myself unsure of the direction the attack was coming from, what was attacking me, and ever worse still: if I was being attacked at all. If you kill something off screen, you still hold up your weapon as if your assailant were still there. You have no way of knowing if it is dead or not, which leads to lots of wasted ammo. In this kind of game, that is a very bad thing. Also, your companion only seems to be good at getting himself chewed up. You are supposed to be able to order them to help you, but in all honesty, the "HELP ME" button is really nothing more than a "RUN INTO THE GAPING MAW OF DOOM" button.

But those few flaws don't really keep this game from being an over-all enjoyable, albeit short, experience. Most players will blow through this game in a weekend, if not less. With survival horror games being rare on the PC and the relatively low price tag of this game, it would be hard to pass this game up if you were looking for something of its kind. Obscure is not perfect, or a modern classic, but it is a lot of scary fun, which is exactly what it's supposed to be.