Obscure: The Aftermath

 


Obscure: The Aftermath is the sequel to an already ironically obscure and little known game. Developed by Hydravision Entertainment, this is a developer from France who only ever made the Obscure 1 & 2 games and nothing else noteworthy, and then disappeared.

I had already beaten the first game, and reviewed it on here. The second game is roughly the same idea, I think it uses the same engine and has a lot of similar mechanics and overall same gameplay, but it does do a lot of things seemingly different as far as I can remember.

In the first game, it was more like this pseudo open ended 'choose your own' story kind of game, where you are free to roam the general map as you please, and there's a roster of NPC characters that you can either save, or can die and then they're permanently gone from the game, changing the overall story. Well, in Obscure 2: The Aftermath, that seems to be mostly done away with, instead favouring a more linear and streamlined route path of where while there is still a large roster of characters you can choose between frequently at different 'checkpoints' - it seems like theres not much in the way of actual dynamically altering the story mode like the first game. It seems like the characters in Obscure 2 all have set deaths and you can't really save them, or if you let someone die too early, it prompts you to instantly re-load last save - I'm not really sure if you can refuse to load last save when you let someone die, or if what happens if you keep playing, but the way it seems is that if characters die 'prematurely' then it just fails the objective and you have to reload save. I actually kind of don't mind and almost prefer it, from my memory, the first game had too much backtracking and running around in circles wondering "Where do i go?" but in this game, since its more linear and streamlined, and the characters have a more linear progression with set death points in the story, it tends to make the pacing more smooth and less annoying to navigate. I could be wrong though, and it could be the case that it lets you keep playing after you let characters die, it just seems to push you much more towards loading your previous save if anyone dies and even during some segments if anyone dies or you fail the objective it does force you to reload.

The game story-wise may or may not roughly continue from the first game, I forget a lot of it by now, but the basic premise is that you're a bunch of college kids starting off at some college dorm, there's these drug flowers going around and you get asked to "sniff the flower" and then shit starts going south quick. So its like these drug infused crazy flowers that either make people turn into monsters, or its all one big drug trip, either way the story is actually really interesting and gripping and I find myself kept wanting to find out more. The dialogue and general writing here is really charming but also goofy and stupid at the same time. It has a really good sense of humour and frequently I'd find myself laughing out loud at some of the shit the characters said. It's the kind of dumb but witty immature humour mixed with the tense and atmospheric horror vibe that comes together just right for me.

The games sound design in particular is really good. The sound effects, music, general atmosphere is just really immersive and exciting. There's all sorts of crazy deranged noises that play in the background, people screaming maniacally, babies, weird noises, creepy grunts and laughs, chainsaws just all sorts of crazy shit. Frequently I'd want to keep turning the audio up and up because the sound design was so interesting. The soundtrack is generally good too, its got a lot of orchestral and very reverb'd out, spaced out dreary / melancholic but suspenseful music tracks and a lot of these creepy female vocal chanting tracks too. The music also changes a lot and is versatile it also has that early 2000s distorted guitar rocking riff parts too, its corny, but also I just find the whole presentation endearing at the same time. The game has a lot of 'soul'.

Something I did differently in this game compared to the first, is I played the whole thing in Co-op. The first one also has co-op, but I only played solo. Well the co-op here is overall fantastic, working together with a buddy to fight the monsters, puzzles, exploring the atmosphere, talking about the crazy sound design, deciding what items to use etc just all works great to create a really intense co-op experience. For example when you open the inventory, both co-op partners have a cursor and can independently interact with the inventory to equip each of their own sub-inventories. You each have 4 slots you can equip weapons and change with dpad, so you frequently have to work together to figure out what items each of you use and best maximize the limited resources you get. Theres also another sort of mini-inventory if you hold Left trigger which pulls up this vertical side menu, here you can use Keys and Healthpacks, mainly. You can heal yourself or your co-op partner at any time too. So it also creates this dynamic of trying to coordinate with your coop partner when to use health, what resources to use, to heal yourself or your buddy etc, its mostly fantastic.

Though, the experience does have some pitfalls
The camera for example, could have probably been handled better. I get what they were going for, in that theres no split screen or anything like that, its just one screen and you both have to control your characters on it, but the problem is trying to also fit in analog stick camera controls for BOTH characters is just a mess. Each player can spin the main camera around, and also STEAL the main focus of the camera to themselves with the Right trigger. So it becomes this disorienting battle of trying to keep your player on the screen, out of harms way, at the same time as almost fighting your coop partner for camera controls, its pretty bad. They could have done better if they just got rid of the whole manual camera stick control, and made it permanent fixed camera like Resident Evil did - that's probably why RE did it in the first place to avoid weird issues like this. The game does have sort of pseudo fixed camera angles here and there, its this weird janky mix of fixed camera but also each player having manual control over the 'main' camera it creates a clusterfuck mess. To make matters worse, one player can run entirely off the screen, and take damage without even being able to see WTF is going on. When this happens, there's a little icon arrow that kind of shows a vague notion of where you are, but its not much to go on. It doesn't ruin the game, but its probably the biggest critique I can deliver of the entire experience.


The game takes you through all sorts of environments, College dorms, hospitals, underground mines, factories, graveyards, backwoods, all that kind of shit. The graphics have this perfect early 2000s ps2 era charm to them too, its rough around the edges but its also this kind of perfect middle ground between Lo-fi and modern graphics that actually kind of enhances the horror atmosphere due to it leaving some to imagination. The pacing and navigation overall is just about the right amount of having to keyhunt and check a bunch of locked doors, but also having to care about the environment and searching around for items. I also really like how frequently the game will suddenly change you into the perspective of 2 brand new characters, almost like when the chapter ends and the next chapter starts, then youre playing as new characters and either retracing the steps to meet up with the other guys, or seeing the story play out through another perspective. Its a neat way to change up the pacing and keep things fresh. Speaking of characters, theres a lot of them, like 10, and frequently you'll have these meetup zones where all the characters will be standing around in a group and you can freely choose what 2 you want to take. Each of them have their own unique ability, like one guy will be the Lockpick guy, one will be the Agility person that can climb things well, one guy will be Strength for pushing boxes, and so on. So you'll come across puzzles and environmental obstacles that require you to go back and switch characters to proceed - thankfully this is usually pretty obvious and the characters will say things out loud to give you hints about who you need. Though, a few times, the mechanics can be kind of obtuse and bullshit, like the climbing sections having janky controls that make it easy to miss what you're supposed to do.

The enemy designs are creepy and good too, I'm not really sure what to call them but they're basically deformed weird nightmare creatures that would look like something you might imagine during a drug trip. Theres all sorts of different kinds, little baby fetus things that attack you, some more humanoid two legged half animal zombie things other huge hulking monsters that continually spawn babies and so forth. The combat is pretty simplistic, you basically have 4 weapon slots you can switch between at a button press, then you just hold a button and you get a little dot that auto-aims on the nearest enemy, letting you know you'll hit them, then you press the trigger to shoot. You can move while aiming which is useful, theres not really any manual aiming so its just a matter of careful positioning and using your ammo wisely. It's a nice minimal system that works well enough in co-op because you can each see your own aiming dot. The melee combat is a little more cumbersome, particularly because you can accidentally hit your partner, so you have to be really careful about when and where youre going to swing. Theres also these electric battery powered items such as Taser, Chainsaw, and a few others, where you can recharge your battery at these stations and both co-op partner shares a battery meter, it was a pretty fun little mechanic that mixed things up.

Theres a decent amount of puzzles, overall they're good enough and don't take too long to figure out and make you use your brain, but they also tend to be hit and miss or just have poor design or wording. For example early in the game, theres this bookshelf puzzle. It lets you enter the room and interact with it, but even if you know the answer you cant complete it until you go across the building and find a piece of paper that tells you what the answer is. Even worse, you can find the piece of paper and not pick it up, so you can technically know the answer, try to solve it, but it wont work unless you actually put the paper in your inventory, it just doesn't make sense. Other moments where the puzzles are just stupid or the game could have done better, is these hacking minigames where it gives you a few letters to choose from and a limited amount of slots to fill in the blank. Well, one of these the hint was "A famous person" and the answer was Mozart. The games hint of just saying "famous person like Christopher Columbus or Shakespeare" seemed a bit too vague, it would have made more sense if the game narrowed it down a bit more and said something like "A famous COMPOSER". These hacking minigames happened a few more times, and were equally as vague. Another time the answer was "Freud" and there was no hint at all, just 5 empty slots, somehow we figured it out but yeah they could have done a better job with the hints. Something else that was kinda weird and bad was, the game has End credits, but its a fake-out end credits and then you keep playing afterwards - but this actual last segment of the game is like a total onslaught of puzzles one after another and they were so obtuse and mindboggling and difficult we had to just look them up after an hour of failing miserably. Not sure why they thought it was necessary to randomly barrage you with puzzles back to back at the end of the game, but alright.

Theres a handful of boss fights and theyre actually pretty awesome, the first one is typical just shoot 'til dead, but then the bosses after this have some sort of gimmick you have to pickup on. Such as stunning the boss, then finding some object or lever in the environment you have to use. These boss fights are pretty intense, and thankfully the game does a good job at pacing and giving you ample amount of save locations - speaking of saving , I like the way saves work in this game. You come across these flowers on the wall that you can snort, then you fall to the ground and it lets you save. But, the catch is, you can only save once at these things. So the save system prevents you from just constantly savescumming, but also gives you a lot of these one use saves to where you dont ever end up massively losing progress - its a nice system.

But yeah the bosses overall are memorable and fun, one of the last bosses is this deformed chainsaw guy which is an intense fight, you gotta use the chainsaw to cut his tree limbs off to beat it.
Then you finally get to the last boss, this guy is in a football field and theres a bunch of power panels scattered around, the goal here is to stun the boss and then run over and use the levers on the power panels and frantically spam the button to push the lever down, which eventually drops some giant object on the boss. This boss is really challenging, but I wouldn't say its a bad boss fight, its just genuinely challenging and fun. You gotta work together real closely with your co-op partner here to use your health items wisely , ammo, and coordinate when to dodge his constant ranged attacks, and when to use the panels. This boss fight is even more insane and intense because 2 of the panels are locked behind minigames, one of them you have to Lockpick MID BOSS FIGHT as well as do some other Mindgame system. So you gotta stun the boss then run over to the panel and do a lockpicking minigame all while the boss is stunned , before he gets back up. Yeah of course we failed a dozen or so times, but each and every time we failed we knew how to get better at it, and how to improve. So I'd say its a well designed, yet really challenging final boss.

The game has tons of laugh out loud cutscenes and dialogue moments, but the story is corny yet endearing enough to keep your interest in good B tier horror movie fasion, the combat is minimalistic enough yet engaging and fun, I like all the resource management and the UI systems and all that, the environments are interesting and packed full of atmosphere and grimy graphics, its kind of got everything. Seems like critics shit on this game when it came out and thought the game sucked, but to me its a great campy horror game, and actually one of the best co-op horror games I can think of.

8/10