When Sarah receives a letter from her great Uncle indicating that she has inherited his estate, she embarks to the mansion to unravel its plethora of secrets. Over the course of 3 chapters and 29 sequences, Obscuritas is packed with fun and diversified locations such as an underground vault, a fun-house, a botanical garden filled with traps, and a giant mansion packed with secrets. In order to solve her great Uncle's mysteries, Sarah must complete puzzle after puzzle, most of which reveal keys that aid the player in progression.
Obscuritas is a game that promises not to hold your hand, which it doesn't do at all. You are left on your own to figure out the solutions to each enigma, and some are quite complex. Some are more fun than others, but in the end your reward for figuring out the right combinations is generally a key to unlock another door, which will then allow you to usually progress to the next sequence or the next part of the puzzle. There's an obvious inspiration from games such as Pineview Drive and Astray that makes its presence heavily known here.
In later levels, there's a lot of trial and error to be had, and checkpoints are few and far between, making the game both punishing and challenging in certain locations. The lifespan of the title runs for roughly 9 hours, depending on your level of skill and mental agility. While the game has a genuinely spooky atmosphere, the "scares" that it relies on are relatively cheap and predictible if you've played a good amount of horror games. The ambiance and uniqueness of each level is truly the glue that holds Obscuritas together, coupled with the feeling of success that one gets when finally overcoming one of its many frustrating challenges.
I reviewed this game a long time ago when it initially launched, and in said review I complained about Obsuritas' horrible optimization issues. At that time, I was running an AMD FX-8350/R9 290x/8GB DDR3 2133 system, and on high settings I saw framerates as abysmal as 1-15FPS no matter what graphical settings I ran on. When I took to the forums, the developer locked my initial thread without just cause, and in my follow-up thread they said that the game is "as optimized as it can be because of the game engine". After update 1.2, these issues were supposedly ironed out, and the developer wanted me to re-review the game; I'm just now getting the chance.
Now I have an i7 6700k/GTX 1080/16GB DDR4 3000 rig, for those less tech savvy, it's a massive upgrade in comparison to my last computer. Believe it or not, somehow this game runs just as horrendously as it did during its initial launch, and on high settings I saw frames that were between 25-30 FPS. It was only after turning everything to low, and turning off anti-aliasing, that I was able to gain playable framerates in most areas, though they still tanked. This is absolutely unacceptable "optimization", especially after the developer told me that this title is more geared for NVIDIA/Intel builds. What's more, when playing this game with such low settings, Obscuritas looks like garbage and still acts as though it's running below 30 FPS, even when I see a count of 80+FPS. The shadows are as jagged as Minecraft blocks, the lighting is unbearable, and graphically it's just a very unpleasant sight to behold.
The bottom line is that while Obscuritas has good potential, it's the abhorrent optimization and lies from VIS Games that truly holds it back. Let's face it, a game made in 2016 should not stand a chance against a GTX 1080 GPU, a card that has only recently been outdone by it's Ti counterpart. Take this into consideration up against your own rig before you purchase, that and the fact that the developer initially tried to cover up their lack of optimization by saying they wanted a game that people running SLI 980 Ti cards could take advantage of. It's awful performance is not worth dealing with for it's content, there are still far better horror games out there anyway.
Rating: 1.5/5.0 - It's Bad.The Horror Network
Steam Group:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetworkSteam Curator:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetwork#curation 1.5