Posted May 22, 2009
In a world where the survival horror market is dominated by heavy hitters Capcom and Konami, leave it to French developer Hydravision to sneak this ironically titled game into the market. While staying true to the staples and cliches that have made the game genre what it is, ObsCure throws in its own unique elements, with 5 switchable characters, all of whom have different abilities. Did they succeed? Well, yes and no.
The story begins with a short prologue in which we are briefly introduced to each character, who attend Leafmore High, the most out-of-code high school in the country (no joke, I've seen shacks in better shape than this place). When basketball star Kenny Matthews doesn't show up for class the next day, his sister, girlfriend, and...well, school reporter figure something happened to him, and stay after school to investigate. What they are about to find, though, is that there are more dangerous things lurking the school grounds than yesterday's meatloaf.
Played from the classic, "camera clearly doesn't want you to see what's around the corner" perspective made famous by the Resident Evil series, you roam the various buildings on campus, picking up objects to use in puzzles, medical kits and energy drinks to heal yourself, and a surprising amount of guns and ammunition for a school. Each of these objects is used as you would expect, with new areas opening up upon gaining the right tool, and the others for the various fights you will get into with the 'night school' rejects. You travel in pairs, with the PC (or a second player) handling your secondary character, and though quest and health items are shared with all, you can trade weapons back and forth with each other, and if you run out of healing items you can return to a 'meeting place' where you can pick up another character who might be in better shape (or for other reasons, as I am about to explain).
Not only is each character distinct in looks and acting (with voice talent recognizable from anime and Saturday morning cartoons), but each one has a skill as well, ranging from the simple such as sprinting to the useful-for-first-time-players "Did I miss anything in this room" skill of the reporter. And not only that; should a character fall to the blows of the various monsters, the game doesn't end; you simply switch to your partner, and if they die as well, you can keep going until all five of your party are gone.
Combat is also unique in some ways as well; the monsters you encounter have an adversity to light (and daylight especially; somewhere Joe Dante is furiously looking to see if this violates some copyright of his). During the game, you'll get a chance to pick up flashlights which can be set to high strength and burn away protective layers of filth from the creatures, leaving them highly vulnerable. This only lasts for a short time before the light has to cool off, but in a really great twist, you can TAPE THE FLASHLIGHT TO THE GUN YOU'RE USING, which has to be up there on the coolness scale with a having a chainsaw bayonet, except more useful.
The game moves at a fairly quick pace, and most will probably finish it within a few hours or so (about average for this kind of game). During that time, you will get to see a decent variety of environments, including the cafeteria, library, infirmary, and a very cool auditorium, as well as places "One Should Not Wish To Go" (TM). And for that time, it's a pretty fun ride. There are a lot of in-jokes scattered around the place, referring to Italian zombie films, American zombie films, and even the '90s film "The Faculty" (the most obvious being the slacker dope dealer you meet up with early in the game looking so much like Josh Hartnett it's a wonder he didn't sue). And in a great turn, your teammate is...surprise, surprise...USEFUL. When blocking your path, they'll helpfully let you push them or get out of your way entirely. When monsters attack, they use ammo judiciously and take on the clearest threats first. They let YOU handle all the health and weapon concerns (you can even TELL them what kind of weapon to utilize), and when you tell them to stay, they STAY. Never has a sidekick been so useful and yet not annoying at the same time.
All is not perfect in the game, though. Saving, for instance, is accomplished through the much-maligned "item pick-up," in which you must find discs lying around campus. But even this has a silver lining, because as long as you have discs, you can decide for yourself where to save; no running back to the typewriter in the room fifty miles away. The controls are reprogrammable, but don't fit a keyboard style; yes, it is a PC game, but I highly recommend getting a PS2 or XBox-style controller and mapping them as you see fit (I played it with a Logitech Rumblepad 2, using the Profiler program to map the keys to the PS2 version's commands). I believe doing so will make your run-through a much more enjoyable experience.
Of its troubles, though, my two major gripes are with the enemies and the 'unique skills' system. Most enemies, taken one on one, pose no major threat. However, the inverse isn't necessarily true when in groups of monsters; sometimes you can get through a mobbing without taking a hit, but other times you'll find your team dead in 10 seconds without a clue as to what happened. The trouble is, the monsters are pretty frail for the most part, but when they hit, they hit incredibly hard, and while your buddy is merrily chipping away the huge monstrosity stumbling down the hall after you, the small, quick zombie-type has managed to jump on you and smack you several times before you can respond, by which point he's pulling your intestines out.
This also points out the problem with each character's unique skill; since characters can be easily killed (even insta-killed in one solvable, but initially unfair circumstance) and the game can be solved with only one person, the skill each player has is simply an augmentation. Sure, it's nice to have the character who can sprint, but he only goes a little faster than everyone else. Sure, a character can pick a lock in a second, but everybody else can do it, too, given enough time. Essentially, the two special characteristics of the game serve only to cancel each other out; everyone's 'special' ability, in the end, isn't so special. On the one hand, this makes it easier to clear the game without loading a bunch of times; on the other hand, it cripples interesting puzzle possibilities by watering down what everybody in the group can do (and I would think most of you would probably work to keep everybody alive...well, almost everybody, anyway). It's a tough choice, and for a first game Hydravision made the right decision to keep people involved and stop the flow of the game from grinding to a halt if an important character dies, and giving the player more freedom in who they want to play with. But seeing the teammates interact a little bit more and improving the story and puzzles would be something to see in the sequel (which I haven't played as of this writing, but I know of its existence).
In all, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not playing this game. While it may not be the game to change the genre, it is an evolution to some extent that gives the genre a facelift. And while it gets a few things wrong, it gets so much right that game designers should look to it for pointers on how to improve their own products ("Hey, why can't we make sidekicks like these?"). Konami, Capcom, take note: sometimes the best way to make a survival horror game is not to keep lengthening the cutscenes. Sometimes, the best thing to do is make the core game interesting.
In this, Hydravision succeeded.
The story begins with a short prologue in which we are briefly introduced to each character, who attend Leafmore High, the most out-of-code high school in the country (no joke, I've seen shacks in better shape than this place). When basketball star Kenny Matthews doesn't show up for class the next day, his sister, girlfriend, and...well, school reporter figure something happened to him, and stay after school to investigate. What they are about to find, though, is that there are more dangerous things lurking the school grounds than yesterday's meatloaf.
Played from the classic, "camera clearly doesn't want you to see what's around the corner" perspective made famous by the Resident Evil series, you roam the various buildings on campus, picking up objects to use in puzzles, medical kits and energy drinks to heal yourself, and a surprising amount of guns and ammunition for a school. Each of these objects is used as you would expect, with new areas opening up upon gaining the right tool, and the others for the various fights you will get into with the 'night school' rejects. You travel in pairs, with the PC (or a second player) handling your secondary character, and though quest and health items are shared with all, you can trade weapons back and forth with each other, and if you run out of healing items you can return to a 'meeting place' where you can pick up another character who might be in better shape (or for other reasons, as I am about to explain).
Not only is each character distinct in looks and acting (with voice talent recognizable from anime and Saturday morning cartoons), but each one has a skill as well, ranging from the simple such as sprinting to the useful-for-first-time-players "Did I miss anything in this room" skill of the reporter. And not only that; should a character fall to the blows of the various monsters, the game doesn't end; you simply switch to your partner, and if they die as well, you can keep going until all five of your party are gone.
Combat is also unique in some ways as well; the monsters you encounter have an adversity to light (and daylight especially; somewhere Joe Dante is furiously looking to see if this violates some copyright of his). During the game, you'll get a chance to pick up flashlights which can be set to high strength and burn away protective layers of filth from the creatures, leaving them highly vulnerable. This only lasts for a short time before the light has to cool off, but in a really great twist, you can TAPE THE FLASHLIGHT TO THE GUN YOU'RE USING, which has to be up there on the coolness scale with a having a chainsaw bayonet, except more useful.
The game moves at a fairly quick pace, and most will probably finish it within a few hours or so (about average for this kind of game). During that time, you will get to see a decent variety of environments, including the cafeteria, library, infirmary, and a very cool auditorium, as well as places "One Should Not Wish To Go" (TM). And for that time, it's a pretty fun ride. There are a lot of in-jokes scattered around the place, referring to Italian zombie films, American zombie films, and even the '90s film "The Faculty" (the most obvious being the slacker dope dealer you meet up with early in the game looking so much like Josh Hartnett it's a wonder he didn't sue). And in a great turn, your teammate is...surprise, surprise...USEFUL. When blocking your path, they'll helpfully let you push them or get out of your way entirely. When monsters attack, they use ammo judiciously and take on the clearest threats first. They let YOU handle all the health and weapon concerns (you can even TELL them what kind of weapon to utilize), and when you tell them to stay, they STAY. Never has a sidekick been so useful and yet not annoying at the same time.
All is not perfect in the game, though. Saving, for instance, is accomplished through the much-maligned "item pick-up," in which you must find discs lying around campus. But even this has a silver lining, because as long as you have discs, you can decide for yourself where to save; no running back to the typewriter in the room fifty miles away. The controls are reprogrammable, but don't fit a keyboard style; yes, it is a PC game, but I highly recommend getting a PS2 or XBox-style controller and mapping them as you see fit (I played it with a Logitech Rumblepad 2, using the Profiler program to map the keys to the PS2 version's commands). I believe doing so will make your run-through a much more enjoyable experience.
Of its troubles, though, my two major gripes are with the enemies and the 'unique skills' system. Most enemies, taken one on one, pose no major threat. However, the inverse isn't necessarily true when in groups of monsters; sometimes you can get through a mobbing without taking a hit, but other times you'll find your team dead in 10 seconds without a clue as to what happened. The trouble is, the monsters are pretty frail for the most part, but when they hit, they hit incredibly hard, and while your buddy is merrily chipping away the huge monstrosity stumbling down the hall after you, the small, quick zombie-type has managed to jump on you and smack you several times before you can respond, by which point he's pulling your intestines out.
This also points out the problem with each character's unique skill; since characters can be easily killed (even insta-killed in one solvable, but initially unfair circumstance) and the game can be solved with only one person, the skill each player has is simply an augmentation. Sure, it's nice to have the character who can sprint, but he only goes a little faster than everyone else. Sure, a character can pick a lock in a second, but everybody else can do it, too, given enough time. Essentially, the two special characteristics of the game serve only to cancel each other out; everyone's 'special' ability, in the end, isn't so special. On the one hand, this makes it easier to clear the game without loading a bunch of times; on the other hand, it cripples interesting puzzle possibilities by watering down what everybody in the group can do (and I would think most of you would probably work to keep everybody alive...well, almost everybody, anyway). It's a tough choice, and for a first game Hydravision made the right decision to keep people involved and stop the flow of the game from grinding to a halt if an important character dies, and giving the player more freedom in who they want to play with. But seeing the teammates interact a little bit more and improving the story and puzzles would be something to see in the sequel (which I haven't played as of this writing, but I know of its existence).
In all, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not playing this game. While it may not be the game to change the genre, it is an evolution to some extent that gives the genre a facelift. And while it gets a few things wrong, it gets so much right that game designers should look to it for pointers on how to improve their own products ("Hey, why can't we make sidekicks like these?"). Konami, Capcom, take note: sometimes the best way to make a survival horror game is not to keep lengthening the cutscenes. Sometimes, the best thing to do is make the core game interesting.
In this, Hydravision succeeded.