Obitus (1991)

Name:Obitus
Number:243
Year:1991
Publisher:Psygnosis
Developer:Scenario Developments/Tech Noir
Genre:Action
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (107W/78L)

For the second time in a row, I've come across a game that really tries my general ethos that there's something of value to any game. That no matter how crappy it is, there's a lesson to be learned from it. Any such lessons that could be learned from Obitus are so obvious as to be a basic building block of the idea of making a game. It's that bad.

The story is, a long time ago, a king was unable to find a suitable bride in all the land. The search went on for long enough that a wizard, who hid himself from the world, heard of it. The wizard hated the king a great deal, and created a bride for him. Not a good bride, but one born with a spark of evil.

The king and the bride meet through convenient circumstances and they fall in love. Four sons are born, and when the king dies, they start to war among themselves. It goes on for a while, and the land becomes a hellhole. A strange device appears in a tower in the middle of the land, and each son takes a piece of it, which allows control over the populace. An uneasy, oppressive peace falls over the land.

In the present of the 1990s, a history teacher by the name of Wil Mason, driving his Volvo, crashes during a thunderstorm. He wanders until he find a glowing light which leads to a strange tower. With nowhere else to go, he sleeps, and finds himself teleported a thousand years in the past.

The first problem with this game is that most of this doesn't really matter as far as the game is concerned. There are supposedly four figures in four castles you need to kill, but this is about all it matters. Mason might as well be a baker for all he matters to the story, since as soon as the game begins he becomes a silent killing machine, capable of shooting a bow with unnerving accuracy.

I'm not arguing that this backstory is bad, it just doesn't matter. The game doesn't have an actual story as much as a series of cryptic statements from people you're probably about to kill. It'd be one thing if Mason being a history teacher was relevant or if the machine is relevant as anything other than a treasure hunt. They aren't, you could say any of a thousand different backstories and they'd be true.

I didn't realize that the game had VGA graphics at first, so I played a bit in EGA.

You start off in the tower with a key on the floor in front of you and four doors around you. Something a text crawl helpfully tells you. The way things work is not obvious. Oh, you get a GUI with information on it, but that information is not necessarily obvious to the player. There are nine actions which are mostly self-explanatory. Mostly.

Info is weird. The manual tells you nothing about it, but obviously you can use it on items to get information. This tells you the various stats of items, from the straight-forward and useful to the more vague. Weight and nutrition have direct effects, you have a weight limit and nutrition is how much an item heals you. Mystic and value don't seem to have much direct effect in gameplay.

For a long while, I didn't figure out that you can use info on characters in the game world. Here, you can trade with people. I want to repeat that the manual mentions nothing about any of this. This is where value sort of comes into effect, because presumably trades are based on the value of items. The theory then, is you trade the most expensive item you can find, then work your way down.

This makes Info the closest the game has to a look function. It's more illuminating than a regular look function in theory, telling you all you'd ever need to know about an item. In practice, a list of statistics with very little to go by beyond that is very unhelpful. Everything requires you to guess as to what it does and how you use it.

Which is a problem with puzzles, which all involve guessing what item you have to use on which hotspot. Hotspots are tricky to click on, which is odd because the mouse cursor doesn't seem like it should cause any issues with this. When you have many keys and don't know if you use them on the door or the lock and have no indication of which is which, you have a problem. When things start getting less blatant, it's very troublesome. There is no indication that you're doing something right or wrong until an action happens, be it a key in the right lock or you accidentally shooting an arrow at nothing.

This leads to a sort of new section, the maze sections. Technically the maze is the same as the section you just came from, except you can actually move forward and backward. Controls are customizable and imitate a single button joystick, but you still need to use the mouse to click on things. You can use an actual joystick to, which seems like it would be interesting for a few moments.

The big draw of the game is the shiny, first-person parallax graphics. It's very nice, some of the best first-person 2D work you could find. Except that it's also quite confusing. Turn and you track in one of eight directions. It's enough distance that you would turn in real life, except that when turning it doesn't feel like you're properly turning, just sort of side-stepping.

So you have to rely on the GUI to tell you where you're pointing. The most obvious problem is that looking at the GUI to figure out where you're at kind of ruins it, even if it has a compass. You're looking at a map, not the game, in a game where the graphics are the selling point. The less obvious is that the way thing on the compass is a man, so the two ends of it? Those are the sides. Took me a while to figure that out.

Moving is no less confusing. Unlike turning, there's no locking, you just keep moving until you hit a wall. To help, there's no turning unless you're on an octogon, to name a tile. If, say, there's a octogon you can turn around on in-between the octogon you started on and the octogon that's at the end of your walk, the only way you can find out is by looking at the GUI.

This gives the game a very empty feeling. Not as if they forgot to populate the game world, just that you're doing the bare minimum for it to be called a game. You walk around, click on things, pick up items, then use them when relevant. It's just a game, not anything you could actually do with that, nothing special.

In order to navigate around the game, you either need to make a map yourself or take a map someone else made. I'm thankful that maps already existed, because that's just not a rewarding process. To start with, you're mapping eight-sided tiles, which is something you're going to have to figure out how to do yourself rather than take advantage of anything preexisting. So you have to figure out how you're going to map it, then actually go through the large and confusing area of the game, in a game that has more trouble than the usual dungeon crawler in making areas feel distinct.

Combat is dead simple. Have a weapon selected, and if you're in a first person section, click on what you want dead. Then keep clicking until it dies. Strategy consists of using a different weapon if it doesn't die and you have to reload. Side-scrolling sections add a little strategy, sometimes you can jump into an enemy to kill it.

But there is a curious aspect of this. Some enemies don't attack you. You can talk to them. They're obviously hostile, because this game doesn't do subtle. If this game had clever writing, you might think this was foreshadowing that the player isn't a good guy. Then the game makes you kill an obviously non-evil NPC to advance.

I'm not saying that a game can't allow you to kill innocent characters, but I expect it to be acknowledged. Tell me I'm evil for doing it. Acknowledge that it's not the act of a hero. I can believe that a British history professor, when push comes to shove, will kill someone trying to kill him. I do not believe that one is going to kill a defenseless old woman. Especially not when he could just walk around her!

Eventually, there's a path out of this area, leading to another new type of gameplay. A side-scroller section. It's dead simple, you go from left ro right until you reach a dead end or another area. Enemies occasionally pop up to stop you, but as far as I got, they weren't much trouble. Hell, you can just jump into them and they die.

Much later, there's yet another style of gameplay, sort of like the side-scroller, except designed like a game with more traditional screens. It's built off part of the last game from the lead developer, The Kristal, most visibly with being able to go into the background and the foreground to simulate depth. It's the part that most feels like a game, though this could be because this is a boss dungeon, at least in theory.

It's at this point that I gave up. Oddly, this is because the game finally throws something at me I feel like isn't just me randomly clicking and things happen, because there are traps. Traps that are very hard to avoid. Up until this point, the difference between getting hit and not getting hit felt very small. You have a lot of health and most enemies don't do that much damage. Traps are different, they take a big chunk of health and it seems almost impossible to dodge them.

Which means I've been playing it wrong and I need to do everything right in order to make it to the end. Since the difference between dodging and getting hit is barely noticeable, that's not very easy or fun. Healing is limited to items. Sleep is just busywork, a fatigue bar periodically fills and you need to rest lest you lose more health.

I did look up the ending afterwards. Wil just sort of ascends the opening tower, and then goes on further adventures in other worlds? I mean, that is a valid idea. A history teacher who is suddenly capable of fighting monsters and wizards like some sort of knight? Yeah, I'd want further adventures too. But considering everything else the game has, I'm just left wondering about it all. To the rating.

Weapons:
They differ in power, but otherwise they might as well be the same thing. 1/10

Enemies:
It's a bit odd that the only real difference between enemies is if they attack you when you get close to them or if they attack you after you attack them. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
The difference between and enemy who doesn't attack you and a NPC is usually how fast they die. 1/10

Levels:
Mazes intended to extend the length of an already questionably long game. 1/10

Player Agency:
Outside of hotspot issues, I had zero problems with the mouse and keyboard setup. It could have used some quick select keys for actions, but otherwise I can't see how this aspect could be improved. 7/10

Interactivity:
Only the most important actions do anything, otherwise you might as well be clicking into the void. 1/10

Atmosphere:
It's certainly an alien and mysterious fantasy world, but this quickly disappears when it becomes clear that they just didn't make much of anything. 3/10

Graphics:
The parallax is nice, but the spritework seems quite limited in many ways. Most characters just move to attack, so animation is extremely limited. It's also very samey within an area. 4/10

Story:
A barely important wall of text which could have added so much if the developers actually had some writing in-game. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Passable music and some forgettable sound effects. 3/10

That's 23, which is what the numbers add up to, yet it isn't anywhere near the passing grade that would describe. With a wave of the magic wand of boredom, I shall call it 13. Still feels like a higher number than it should get, but I guess between the graphics and the way I had no complaints with controls, it has something.

Obitus, as a game, is terrible in every regard. It does three genres, each so poorly that you have to wonder what the primary focus was. Having tech demo visuals is a selling point for a tech demo, a game needs something more. This is just nothing, a black stain on Psygnosis's library.

The only thing interesting about it is how some enemies only attack you if you attack first. If it was used by someone more clever, it could make for some interesting gameplay. A different take on getting around some enemies. Or perhaps make it so that attacking an enemy who isn't hostile has consequences.

And the reviews, back in the day, well, quite a few praise the game. I can only hope the check cleared. There are a few reviews that point out that the game is boring and pointless. The SNES version was actually named one of the ten worst games of 1994 by some magazine I've never heard of.

From a technical standpoint, the DOS version I've just played is the worst version. Other versions of the game include lighting mechanics, where you have to use torches and lanterns to see in the dark. Technically, it still exists here, but because the game is in 16 colors even in VGA mode, it never changes.

The SNES version is the best, since apparently resting actually heals you there, even if it comes at the cost of random battles and having to do mouse tasks with a gamepad. It's still not good, but at least you can win without feeling like you're torturing yourself.

Next time, we'll see Skyfox, one of the games I've been looking forward to in 1984.