Obitus
| Developer: Scenario | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Psygnosis | Sound: |
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| Year: 1991 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Action-adventure | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
5/10 | |
If I understood the plot correctly, a history teacher, after a car accident at night, in the middle of nowhere, under a downpour, decided to take shelter in a ruined tower. Unfazed by the horror movie atmosphere, he thought it was the perfect moment for a nap. When he woke up, of course, his car was gone. The road was gone too. And his clothes had changed. In truth, he had been transported to a medieval fantasy world… Or someone had overdone it with the Grand Marnier.
Obitus is an adventure game dressed up as a role-playing game. Not a bad thing, but don’t expect a version of Dungeon Master. Instead of breathless combat, the focus is on presentation and genre blending.
At first, it looks like a dungeon crawler: first-person view, interactions with the environment using the mouse, and the joystick for turning … in 45-degree bursts, meaning you’re given the choice of not four, but eight directions with each step! It’s pretty disorienting and leaves no chance for a player who would skip mapping on graph paper.
The animation during movement creates a beautiful illusion of 3D. Apart from that, I can’t think of any other compliments. You only control one character, the combat is sluggish, the enemies are static, interactions with the few locals are limited, there’s little equipment to collect, and you don’t get that sense of progression (or even anxiety) found in other games of the genre. What’s left is the “joy” of mapping out each path, while managing limited resources (food, ammo, torches, and also monitoring fatigue).
And when you finish combing through an area, you’ll be thrown onto a road, the camera will switch to the side, and an arcade mini-game will pit you against hordes of bandits; once again, very well-presented, full of parallax effects, but not terribly fun, nor precise to handle, if you ask me.
Finally, the third phase involves plundering sorry, visiting castles or abbeys by manipulating icons at the bottom of the screen, and occasionally, knocking out a guard. The view is still from the side, but now you move on two axes.
Ultimately, what stands out from this experimental “3-in-1” is: an engaging style, immediate controls, but simplistic mechanics. It’s a shame the soundtrack didn’t get the same attention as the visuals, it could’ve added the spark of energy it lacks. The constant disk swaps don’t help either, but installing it on a hard drive should fix that.
The title was adapted for Atari ST and PC-DOS in 1991, and later for Super Nintendo in 1994. The latter version features a controller-friendly interface.
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