Obscure: The Aftermath

So my friend likes horror games, and now instead of waiting for new ones he likes to dig through the bargain bins and buy any he can find. He got this one, and after playing through the first part alone he decided to get me and another friend to play it with him. Because while the game is awful, its one feature that makes it tolerable is the ability to go through it in co-op mode, the crutch of any developer who knows people will wade through crap if they can do it with a buddy. And the co-op is kind of fun, honestly. Mostly because you can beat your partner senseless with bats and hockey sticks with no repercussions. We spent so much time doing this that we figured out a retaliatory hit immediately after getting struck will always result in knocking the original aggressor to the ground, and probably added a decent half an hour to our total play time at least.

Anyway, the game's main failing as a horror game is that it's not scary at all. There's darkness (the game has no brightness control and forces you to adjust the television if you actually want to see shit, ever), and an evil plot, and monsters, and implied rape by mutated freaks, but none of it comes close to ever being frightening or even a little spooky. It really doesn't help that the dialogue is so bad that the only explanation we could come up with is it was written by aliens trying to approximate human speech without really understanding it (the developer turns out to be French, so maybe we weren't far off). The voice acting is awful too, helping make a game trying to be scary into something mostly just hilarious. The graphics are pretty pedestrian too, never enhancing the attempts at frightening the players.

So anyway, there are a bunch of playable characters and each has a unique skill (besides two males sharing one) that you will occasionally need to advance, from hacking electronic locks to picking regular ones to super monkey jumping/climbing ability. They tend to die off over time, and sometimes you're forced to use a specific pair, but you'll often have a choice of who to play as and it's trial and error to figure out what skill you need as you solve simple puzzles and fight off the various annoying enemies. There are of course boss fights along the way that all seem to follow the familiar pattern of fending them off until you stun them long enough to activate whatever environmental effect that actually damages them. It's all pretty rote and uninspired, which along with the laughable presentation makes for a passable experience if you're goofing around with friends but not much of one that's worth taking seriously. There is some merit in being so bad it's good, but the game is simply just regular bad often enough that it's hard to recommend. If you find it on the scrap heap you might enjoy it, but 60% of that will be bashing your partner over the head with chairs, which you can easily do in real life.