Previous Next

Wil Mason was scared. Not only had he been transported to another world, full of goblins, trolls and apples, he was also stuck in yet another excruciatingly contrived plot with no way out except the Off switch.

Obitus is a game of many parts. Well, three parts. As Wil Mason, mysteriously etc, etc, you must find a way to leave Middlemere (the land full of apples) and return to Blighty, preferably alive and maybe even with another "I" for your first name.

First off, you need to negotiate your way through the forest, using a first-person view of its bowers and sylvan glades. This scrolls extremely smoothly in 3D, and uses some great lighting effects. Around the forest are arrows, men to fire arrows at, rings, cherries and, of course, apples. All can be picked up and any can be used, though obviously even a well-aimed cherry isn't going to fell a baddie.

When you eventually stagger out of the forest you're thrown into a horizontally-scrolling section full of more excellent graphics and superb parallax. Here the object is to run very fast (so you can see the gratuitous parallax) and shoot the nasties who pop up from the undergrowth. Assuming you found the arrows, that is.

What happens next depends on where you are. You may enter another 3D first-person bit, like the mine. Or you might enter a building, which leads to another graphical switch. This time you wander from room to room as per your standard RPG, finding moore useful objects, killing baddies and marvelling at the lintels.

You may have noticed that words such as "superb", "marvellous" and "extremely" have been applied to the graphics, but not much mention has been made of the gameplay. Fair dos - there isn't any. Well, there's a bit, but it revolves around collecting keys, using keys, collecting arrows, using arrows to kill nasties, running, dying and getting lost.

In fact, Obitus is like a rotten antique table - an uninspiring collection of disparate game styles roughly slung together and given a lick of excellent graphical varnish, all in a bid of disguise the mould beneath. No, all right, perhaps it's not really very much like an antique table, but it's certainly not much like a good game either. As Josiah Wedgewood once said, "This isn't really very good, is it?"

1. Lush detailed graphics can't hide the lack of anything to do beneath the surface.
2. Calling it an RPG streteches the advertising laws just a tad.
3. Calling it a collection of dull sub-games doesn't.