Obscure

“Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence”

  - School’s Out, Alice Cooper

Innocence can be a terrible thing to lose. Rank it a half-step behind commonsense. Suspend both and you have the foundation for the adventure of a lot of videogames. Count Obscure in that category. The game is the tale of high school hallways horrors. Any student with an ounce of commonsense would have beat feet in the other direction, but then the game – a PlayStation 2 title from MC2-Microids and Hydravision – would not evolve into the action-adventure romp intended.

Kenny and his buds are hanging one day after school shooting some hoops in the gym. After a brief little conversation about taking off for other entertainment, the others (including Shannon, Kenny’s sister who drops some mysterious notions about their parents being gone) leave Kenny alone in the gym. In the locker room, Kenny’s cell phone starts ringing. He answers and it’s his girlfriend inviting him over, and telling him not to be late. While on the phone, a mysterious figure steals Kenny’s red book bag.

Hmm, let’s see – lost book bag and trailing a thief, or calling it good and heading over to the girlfriend’s. Kenny has priorities, and first among those is recovering that book bag. He follows the thief’s obvious trail through a door and into a garden beside the gym that he didn’t know existed. Wandering around, he finds an entry into a room, which has a ladder that leads downward. But first, there is the workbench, and a box with a gun in it. Grabbing some tape and a flashlight, Kenny improvises a weapon, combining the flashlight and gun so that he can work one with the other, and then heads down the ladder into an underground area that is downright creepy.

Why is it creepy? Well, how about those pulsating vines along the walls? Not good enough? How about some pitbull-sized fleshy biped that runs across his path, from one hole in the wall to another?

But Kenny is intrepid, if not foolhardy. He moves forward and finds a room with strange vials, and chemicals. There are other doors, and one leads to a room, which leads to a room where a bald, green-pasty-skinned student is cowering in a corner. This is a good thing, because that student now becomes part of the team.

(This is good for co-op teamplay, or for the solo player who wants to use different angles of attack, and/or the different innate abilities of their teams.)

Of course, the terrified student (no name, which leads one to believe it is a plot point in simply saving the student, or a Star Trek away team member in a red shirt-kind of thing – Ok, he has a name but you don’t find it until you switch players) knows where a gun is and is now armed as well as being the precursor to the Doom 3 aspects of the game, which quickly come into play. Exit the room, and begin to retrace the steps to leave and monsters, big and small, jump out from the walls and attack.

Obscure does have some very interesting ideas, but the general plot points are weak and contrived. Though the preview build of this title was 55% complete (the release date is scheduled for March 29), the game does have some elements that still need work. The camera, for example, does not always follow, and the aim is tied to the right analog while the weapon firing button is the X button. Release the right analog button and you swing back to center. No matter how educated your thumb is you will have to find another way to work the controls.

And you do run out of ammo, and need to find more. If Kenny fails to make it out, the action switches to Shannon, Ashley (Kenny’s girlfriend) and Josh – who begin to investigate Kenny’s disappearance. The principal is odd, as is the groundskeeper – and this smacks a little of the more cliché elements of the game’s story.

Graphically, Obscure is quite well done. The dynamic shadows and lighting do a good job of capturing the mood of the game and little aspects, like the reflections in mirrors add to the world immersion. The animation can be a little limited at times, though. Characters can't jump, so those little knee-hugging mobs can't be avoided easily.

But though it does have a familiarity to it, Obscure is still a steady horror game. The sound elements do a very good job of underscoring the terror aspects of the game, and while there are a fair amount of load times which can disrupt the flow, the game wastes little time on the formalities of setting up the horrific secrets of this Buffy-esque school, and throws puzzles and mazes at the player with a decent amount of monster-attacking action thrown in.

So what if some of the story points belie commonsense or are nice convenient elements? If the game provides a few startled jumps, then it is accomplishing what it meant to do. But whether it can sustain the little adrenalin sparks remains to be seen.