OBSCURE

Five teens, one school, lots of monsters. James Dyson speaks with the devs behind this (ahem) obscure survival horror series

- James Dyson

THE FEATURE

FORMAT PS2 /

RELEASED 2004, 2007 /

PUB MC2-MICROÏDS, PLAYLOGIC ENTERTAINMENT /

DEV HYDRAVISION ENTERTAINMENT /

GET IT NOW EBAY, £40-60

Oh, the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. There’s the acne, the dating, and, of course, the everpresent danger of getting your head bitten off by a mutated plant monster… wait, what?

The Obscure series consisted of a pair of games created by French developer Hydravision Entertainment. Obscure was released in 2004 for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC, while the sequel, Obscure II, arrived on PlayStation 2, PC, and Wii in 2007, then on PlayStation Portable two years later. (That game was known as Obscure: The Aftermath when it arrived in North America in 2008.) In both, you take control of a group of students trying to survive an outbreak of deadly monsters at their school.

RADICAL, DUDE

Obscure was Hydravision’s first videogame. Originally a publisher of pen-and-paper RPGs, it pivoted to the world of digital entertainment by prototyping an action platformer called Jinx, before landing on the idea of doing a survival horror game.

“Most of the team loved horror movies,” explains Pierre Leroux, Obscure’s head of production, “and at that time survival horror games were not the most complex ones in terms of technical complexity and content scope. Meanwhile, box-office numbers for movies like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and The Faculty were skyrocketing. So it seemed like doing a teen slasher movie-style videogame was a good idea.”