Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/10/10/spoilers-obscuritas-pc-2016-review/

When Sarah inherits her great-uncle’s old country house, she has no idea about the dark secret she has stumbled upon and into what obscure world it will take her to.

There isn’t really too much more to the premise beyond that, or there shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to the plot later. But let’s get into the gameplay first.

Unfortunately, the game also has those dreaded game mechanics that every horror game at the time had, collecting batteries and notes. Apparently in this universe, the batteries only have 2 minutes worth of charge to them for some reason. And when the flashlight is running out of power, it flickers, making having it on annoying. Do we really still have to have this mechanic in horror games? I feel like Outlast did the whole batteries thing the best.

Although, you don’t have to dig through ever draw in a dresser to find notes like other games such as every other Amnesia: The Dark Descent clone, as there are very few of them and they’re always on a table and highlight when you look at them.

But weirdly, there are also matchboxes that you can collect to light candles, along with flicking a light switch on if you’re in the mansion to light up whatever room you’re in. Why have all three of these mechanics at once? Why not have the lights in the mansion stop working, forcing you to use the flashlight and candles? It would at least make sense as to why the game has all three mechanics.

For the first half of the game, you’re solving puzzles that your great-uncle has left for you to prove that you’re a worthy heir. It’s slightly silly, but there wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise, and there have been sillier plots and executions of a story. But at some point the game begins introducing puzzles with traps that can kill you. After you move from the house to the greenhouse, there is a trial-and-error maze with traps that can kill you if you go the wrong way. That’s not much of a test for if someone is a worthy heir if they can be killed by simply picking wrong. That’s one hell of a way to ramp up the stakes.

The greenhouse soon leads to an underground maze, which is just as dark and grey as the house (or is it the other way around?), which involves you solving a puzzle involving pressure plates and large rock statues. So this puzzles involves a tiny 80 pound woman lugging giant statues around that must weight at least a few hundred pounds. I guess she must have been really working out.

To be fair, I never had any problems solving the puzzles throughout the game. They all make logical sense to some extent. Some other levels have you finding items, like keys for doors or items to use on other items such as fuses or gears.

And thankfully the character talks to herself when either something happens or you come across something that you should be paying attention to so that you know what’s going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad games that have puzzle solving. Although, there are still a few moments where the character should have said something out loud as a hint to what is going on.

And while I’m giving out compliments, you can actually see your own body if you look down, even if it’s only when I’m running around, and you can see your shadow, which is another thing that a lot of first person games don’t do. But I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.

But to bring the review back down, there are still a few problems, like sometimes there are multiple doors in a level that claim that they require a key, but there is only one key and you have to go to each individual door to figure out if the key goes to it, filling the game out with more pointless busy work

Also, there is no way to manually save the game. There are checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but these aren’t saves, they’re just so that if you die or fail, you can load back to a certain point of the level and just try over again. If you quit the game, you have to start the level all over again. It made me dread coming back to the game if I had to quit for whatever reason.

Graphically, the game is mediocre at best. Everything is so grey and flat. Also, I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I’ve been able to play more resource intensive games at higher framerates, or at least similar framerates than this game. It’s roughly 30fps when the graphics settings are set to high and everything is on, and just over 60fps when everything is on low and turned off. I’m no graphics snob, but there is no reason that a game that looks like this should be running this badly.

And it’s not like I’m the only one to have this complaint, as there are a few people with similar complaints on the Steam forums.

It also doesn’t help that the game is pretty dark for it’s entirety, needing me to constantly have the flashlight constantly on. I know it’s supposed to be a horror game, but even when I have the flashlight on, lit some candles, and have the lights in the room on, it still looks pretty dark. I had to turn up the brightness all the way in the options just to see anything and not strain my eyes.

Which makes it even hard to find objects in a room, and there have been times where I’ve accidentally walked passed something that I was trying to find. Thankfully all items highlight when you’ve moused over them, but it’s annoying.

The store page also claims that the game has a “fear recognition mechanic”, which is PR speak for “this game has jump scares and spooky things happening randomly throughout the game depending on how you’re playing”. How this is supposed to work is that the game will randomly pick ‘scary moments’ and just play them randomly throughout the game, much like the insanity system from Eternal Darkness (2002).

I’m pretty sure that the game plays the same scares at the same points no matter what you do. And frankly, I didn’t feel like playing the game multiple times or spending hours trying to replay a level to see if it worked. The game was a tedious slog the first time.

Random scares include phones randomly ringing as you walk passed them, a clock alarm going off, piano keys being pressed by an unseen force, a statue head moving to look at you, a fly appearing to crawl across your screen, a ghostly apparition appearing at the end of a hallway, sometimes exploding when you get closer, bleeding walls, and shadows of something disappearing around a corner, only for nothing to be there. It even plays some creepy noises to make you think that there is something else following you.

All of these scares happen over and over again, it’s just gets so repetitive. And I’m pretty sure that some of the ghostly shadows are of medical equipment. So spooky.

And the thing is, I’ve spent over 1000 words talking about this game and I haven’t even talked about the plot yet. I know that I briefly mentioned the premise, but the plot is another thing into itself.

WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.

At some point you discover that your great-uncle has a portal in his personal underground labyrinth, and once you figure out how to operate it, it takes you to another dimension. I think? I’m honestly surprised that the plot turned out to be something other than a haunted house with puzzles in it. And the death trap puzzles and the portal that looks like a Stargate is just what happens in the first third of the game.

And this is where the game starts to go off track.

The portal takes you to a house in a field in what looks to be the middle of the mountains, and you have to enter what you think is the basement, only to randomly enter an asylum located under the house, which has an area where you have to dodge spinning blades on moving poles. And this is where it becomes blatantly obvious that the developers clearly tried to stitch together the pre-made assets that they bought off the Unity store. And it doesn’t work.

Soon you come across a whole theme parks worth of levels. I’m being serious here. You come across a Roller-coaster that you have to turn on and remove a log off the tracks, otherwise you die while riding it, then a fun house with flashing lights, a hall of mirrors, and clown jump scares, then a Ferris Wheel that has a brief section with bumper cars that move when you don’t look at them, before moving onto a haunted house with mannequins that only spin in place or disappear instead of moving when you don’t look at them.

Later sections ruin the atmosphere and consistency that the game is trying to have. One area is an homage to the film Cube (1997), one of the creepy dolls looks exactly like Jeff Dunham’s Grandpa character, and there’s even a stupid giant skull that you would see in a cheesy pirate movie from the 50s or a 90’s children’s game show. There’s even a scare that is a balloon coming out of a bathroom sink that’s just an homage to the 1990 version of Stephen King’s IT.

The middle of the game also introduces patrolling monster dogs that can kill you in one shot, are transparent and hard to see, only made harder to see by how dark the game is. Thankfully they have a per-determined patrolling route so you can avoid them. But they aren’t exactly the best of enemies, since half the time I accidentally walked right through them or passed them without realizing it because they didn’t spot you.

At some point I even learned that I could just slowly walk behind them and they won’t notice me.

I don’t even know why these creatures are here, as they just make the game take longer. At east with the puzzles, you can take your time to complete them. The animals just add an extra layer of frustration to the game. And there is a brief moment before the monster dog kills you where the monster dog stops making sound, making you think that you lost the dog, only for the dog to instantly kill you, making that whole experience that much more annoying.

My biggest problem with the game is the amount of levels. I know that variety is the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much spice.

At some point you have to go through a maze.. At this point in the game I gave up and looked for help to get through the maze. There are hints on how to get through it posted by the developer on the Steam forums, so it’s not like I’m the only one who had trouble here. And one trap was so confusing on how it worked. Plus mazes are always some of the worst levels in a video game. At least the developer prevents backtracking and getting lost to a certain extent by cutting off previous parts of the maze by having walls appear. I was still confused by the maze though.

The last level has you backtracking slightly into the level that came before it, or at least part of it despite the fact that the game hasn’t done that before. I was so confused as to what was going on until I realized what the game was doing.

Another level has you going through a cave that contains a pool of water that makes your character walk so slow that I thought that I was going in the wrong direction and that this was the games way of telling me to not go that way.

And to top it all off, there is a level of the game where you just walk for a while before finding a key in a small house that opens a nearby gate. And that is what the whole level is. The walking to the house was so long that the game has to put a checkpoint after the walk before you get to the house so if you die to the monster dog, you don’t start the whole level again. Why is this level here?

That’s the worst thing about this game. Half of the time I was questioning why something was in the game. Half the levels could have easily been cut out and the game would have lost nothing.

This game is one of the worst that I’ve played. It’s execution is tedious and annoying at the best of times, and that’s me being polite. If it wasn’t for the fact that I bought this for incredibly cheap on a sale and made this review, I wouldn’t have given this game the time of day. Especially when there are better games out there for free.