Review #705: Obscure - The Aftermath

 Anything's good enough to get high if you believe hard enough.

 Seems this was my October of Horror-game sequels: Resident Evil 2, The Evil Within, MediEvil 2 and Castlevania - Legacy of Darkness, the latter two being sequels to games I played the very last October. Not to break the trend, here comes Obscure - The Aftermath, sequel to a game I played earlier this year. This game has often been ridiculed and been made fun of, particularly because of its cheesy story and dialogue, but just as with the first game, it's a bit of a gem in the rough.

 The story picks up a few years after the first game. Shannon, Stan and Kenny return in playable form, although their experiences throughout the first game have changed them. Corey, Sven, Amy, Mel and Jun join the cast as fellow university students. A new black flower has sprout and all the cool teens are using it to get high and party, but for many, this trip might be their last. The story is pretty bland and dumb, and the dialogue borderlines on cringe-inducing, but it kinda works since it wants to be your generic slasher horror movie cast, so you've got your dumb teenager humor, dumb-sassy characters and every stereotype you're used to, for better or worse. The game has received a lot of flak, and I agree, if you take the cutscenes and dialogue out of context, the game looks ridiculous, in a bad way, but if you take them as part of a whole, they kinda fit. Kinda. It's not trying to be Evil Within 2 melodrama, it's trying to be a silly horror movie about dumb teens having to deal with monsters.

 The core gameplay is similar to the original game, but not quite the same. Just like before, when you play you take a couple of characters, unlike the first game, sometimes you can pick, sometimes the game decides for you. The entire game can be played in multiplayer if you want. Just as with the first game, each character(Well, except two) has a unique ability: Sven and Kenny are the muscle, so they can move heavy objects or turn tight valves. Stan returns as a master locksmith, being able to open any(Well, almost) lock. Corey is acrobatic, so he can jump and cling onto ledges. Amy can decipher codes and clues. Mel... Mel is a hacker, and gets the WORST puzzles in the game. You're given an array of letters, with quite a few filler letters, and you have to figure out which famous person's name you can spell. There are no hints, NOTHING, which is incredibly dumb. Let me save you the hassle, the three passwords you'll need are 'MOZART', 'FREUD' and 'EINSTEIN'. You're welcome. Shannon, tainted by her exposure to the spores on the first game, can interact with black spores and remove them and, lastly, there's Jun. She's an optional character that you only get to play a very brief while, if you manage to reach her before her health runs out, so she has no special ability.

 Maybe you noticed something... In the first game, abilities were more like perks, being able to tell if there was something left to find, a double attack, etc. And that's because anyone could die at any moment in the first game. Not so this time around, as every ability is required to progress. This means that if either character you are using dies it's game over. It's a change I'm not too fond of, not that that means nobody dies, au contraire, no playable character is safe from death... albeit a from a scripted one.

 The rest of the game plays pretty much like your standard  survival horror game: Explore environments, solve puzzles, kill monsters and manage your ammo and healing supplies. The way supplies work in this game is pretty weird, some supplies may randomly spawn or not, so you can't always rely on supplies when you retry. And retry you will, because the game is pretty dang stingy with savepoints, and you can only use each ONCE. The progression is pretty linear, and areas are relatively small, so if you die, hopefully, you won't lose much progress. This moderately sized environments make it so that if you realize you require a specific character's abilities, backtracking to the safe zone and swapping character doesn't become tedious. Each 'main' environment in the game hides 3 keys and 1 chest, find all four and you'll get yourself a fancy new weapon.

 I've read a few comments on the game being a bit hard, but you can manage just fine. Having the item menu, the one through which you heal, being in real time can be a bit tough, but you can deal with it. There are a few items that run on electricity, like the Stun-gun, which you can conveniently recharge at any electricity station, that works pretty well and will never run out of ammo. At first I would use the stun-gun and had the CPU ally attack with melee weapons, until I realized that a lot of the time my partner would just stare at thin air, slowly inching towards my target, but it turned out that they are pretty effective with the stun gun. Early in the game you also get a syringe that you can use on the monsters' remains to produce a healing tonic. During the last third of the game you are stripped from all your healing items and weapons, so don't get too stingy with them.

 While I don't think Obscure - The Aftermath is quite as good as the first game, it's still a neat Survival Horror game to play after you're done with you Resident Evils and Silent Hills. You can tell that it's a bit rough around its edges and some things can feel a bit janky, but as a whole it works quite well. The story can be quite bland, and characters quite cheesy, but the gameplay is pure horror, and fun to boot. The early game can be a bit tough as you figure out how best to manage your supplies, but once you find what works for you, you are good to go. All in all, the first game is better, but this one worth seeking out too.
 7.5 out of 10