Isn’t it annoying. This door is blocked off. When you want to just get on with something. This door is blocked off. And before making every single tiny little bit. This door is blocked off. Of progress, you’re forced to read the same. This door is blocked off. Stupid, unhelpful message, over and over. This door is blocked off. Again?

Yes it is, and the first paragraph of this review isn’t the only thing that’s ever been guilty of it. Ah yes, the old eternally unopenable door phenomena. It’s been around since the early days of 3D adventure games when designers first realised they had sufficient processing power at their disposal to construct full-sized buildings, but not quite enough to make all the rooms. What you were left with was a bunch of adventure games that were 3D to look at, but onedimensional to play. Such games had been dying out in recent years, and we thought we might even have seen the last of them. But we haven’t. With Obscure II, Hydravision has led us, unwittingly, back to 1995, a time when most of today’s survival-horror clichés still seemed fresh and exciting. We didn’t want to go back to 1995, of course, but every time we tried to go anywhere else we were told: “You can’t go that way”, “For some reason, this door won’t open” or “The path is blocked by a tangled mesh of flimsy twigs, and even though you’re carrying a chainsaw, a shotgun and a machete there’s no way you’re ever getting past”.

The only way you could enjoy this game is if you have some kind of weird nostalgia for all that was ever wrong with survival horror (and adventure games in general) a decade ago. Indeed, Obscure II, with its clumsy combat, generic story, painfully linear progression, and woefully unimaginative puzzles, has proven strangely popular among one or two of the Play team’s retro-inclined associates. To the rest of us, though, it’s just piss-poor. It tries to be funny, scary, shocking, atmospheric – sexy, even – and embarrasses itself at every single pitiful attempt. The only good thing we can say about it is that it has a co-op mode, which, if you have an appetite for dated survival horror and a similarly inclined pal, means this might be the perfect game for you. If you’re playing alone, though, it means an awful lot of fiddly character swapping, and cursing the inept AI of the NPCs. So anyway, in conclusion Obscure II is. There is something heavy on the other side of this sentence.

Gavin Mackenzie