 Here's another one of those mysterious Super Nintendo games, one you might see for like $7 at a used game store, the label is torn, and it's got a bunch of grime on it from neglect, and you decide, hey, what the heck, let's see what Obidus is. So you pick it up, turn it on, and uh-oh. This is a home console dungeon crawler, it's a PC port. Those don't usually have a high success rate on the SNES. Some are okay, like Eye of the Beholder, and to give Obidus some credit, it does have a couple good things going for it. It was originally developed and released for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS back in early 1991, before getting a port to the Super Nintendo handled by Bulletproof Software in September 1994. And it's important to point out, first and foremost, that despite appearances, this is not a role-playing game, there's no experience, no leveling up, no way to change your character. This is an adventure game, through and through, where you're exploring, managing your items and stamina, talking to NPCs, trading stuff, and defeating the occasional enemy. The game starts out with a blurb of text saying there once was a peaceful kingdom ruled by King Cullen, what, like Matt Cullen? He decides to pass down his rule of the land of Obidus to his four sons, and to ensure everything stays peaceful, he gives them each a gem of tranquility, of course this sounds alarm bells to villains across all walks of fiction, and sure enough, here comes an enchantress named Salome, who does her best worm-tongue impression and gets in the heads of all four sons until they want to kill each other, and the four gems end up lost, and it's up to you to find them to bring back peace. As such, the game is divided up into four different areas, only one is unlocked to start the game, so you wander around and explore, find items to exchange for other items until you eventually find an orb, as well as a key to unlock the next big area, where you look for the next orb, and the next key, and so on, until you've got all four orbs. The thing is though, this isn't one of those games that does a very good job explaining how to do that in the game itself. You start the game, grab this key on the floor, you go out this door, and right away you got this shirtless, altered beast looking dude, weakly punching you. Your instinct is going to be to fight, and your instinct would be wrong because you don't have a weapon, so you have to run away for now. Thankfully there's some arrows over here so you can grab these, go back, and whoa, apparently your character fights dirty, or he really hates that guy's groin. Despite how confusing this game can be at the start, the controls and the interface are actually pretty dang simple for a game of this nature, the Y button picks up items, X drops them, B uses them, and you scroll through items with the L and R buttons. The problem is, the sheer number of items you collect is absurd, and selecting items is a pain since right from the beginning, you have at least seven or eight items in your inventory, and the L and R buttons don't cycle around. It's just annoying. You'd think you'd be able to select stuff in the inventory screen like in Link to the Past, but nope, you still use the L and R buttons to select, and they still don't cycle around. The items you'll be using include keys, gold, silver, more keys, arrows, daggers, some more keys, torches, ropes, and a few more keys. The gold and silver you use to trade with NPCs, the torches, light up caves, and the only two weapons in this game are the arrows and daggers, but the name of the game here is all the keys you have to manage, and that brings me to the castle segments of this game. When you reach the castle in the first area, your viewpoint will change, and the game will look like a side scroller, although unfortunately it doesn't play much like one. The combat in this game is not great, but it's not a huge emphasis either. Instead, you have to explore and figure out which doors you need to unlock to find the stuff you need to advance to the next area, with the catch being that each castle has like two dozen doors, but you only get a certain number of keys. In addition to that, you have to manage your health and stamina, represented by the burning candles at the bottom of the screen. Wandering around will use up your stamina, and if you run out, your health will start to drain. To keep your stamina up, you have to sleep once in a while, and sleeping is always a risk, but what's neat is that if you run into a friendly NPC, they can help protect you from getting attacked. Another nice feature in this game is that the battery save allows you to save anywhere in the game. But those features eventually just lead to more problems. For one thing, you can't sleep in the castle sections. So if you run on a stamina, and you're too far away from the entrance to recharge, and you've saved your game somewhere in the castle, that is a soft lock. And you gotta start the entire game over. Saving anywhere sounds nice, but jeez, this game really needed more than one save slot for this to work properly. Because if you save at their exact wrong time, which can happen often, then you'll have to start your game over. And you're probably not gonna wanna do that more than a couple times because this game doesn't have much else to offer. At least the manual gives you a layout of each area, which is nice. So yeah, unfortunately, Obitus is usually $7 at the used game store for a reason, because it's a flawed, aggravating game. There are some positives here. I like how simply everything is laid out. Navigating is pretty simple. The maps aren't too crazy. The idea of flipping from a first person to a side view perspective is kinda cool. And the game is really short. It can be completed in just a few hours if you know what you're doing, but Obitus just has way too many problems, whether it's from soft locking or struggling to see who is attacking you or listening to the same music over and over, or from simply selecting an item. You really have to be patient with this one if you're gonna enjoy it. There are much better adventure games on the Super Nintendo, especially imports like Clock Tower and Marvelous Another Treasure Island. Or if you wanna stick to the dungeon crawler motif, there's RPGs like Eye of the Beholder or Arcana. But otherwise, give Obitus a pass. It's not worth your time. All right, I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.