With in the Obscurity

I have a soft spot for the games that show up on Steam with almost no coverage, a handful of reviews, and a premise that sounds like it was written at 2 a.m. by someone who genuinely believes in what they are making. With in the Obscurity is exactly that kind of game. QZQ Studio, a prolific Chinese indie house with a long history of low-budget detective adventures, launched this as the opening episode of their Abnormal1999 series, a loosely connected web of supernatural case files rooted in a 1990s fiction about two rival intelligence organizations: the website Abnormal1999, founded by a young Chinese expatriate in the US, and the 403 Intelligence Division, a clandestine police unit back in China. That world-building context is not decoration. It is the reason you should care. The first episode plants you inside a desolate forest where seven bodies have been found, each a member of a local spiritual group, none showing any external injuries. You work the scene from a first-person perspective, collecting clues, reading environmental details, and piecing together what actually happened. The puzzle design leans on observation and deduction rather than inventory juggling, which keeps the pace tight. This is closer to an interactive crime dossier than a traditional adventure game, and that framing rewards patience. If you go in expecting action or fast-moving horror, you will be disappointed. If you sit with it, the atmosphere does something quietly unsettling. The series is structured episodically, with a planned six-episode season. Each episode is designed to be self-contained but threaded into the larger Abnormal1999 mythology, which already spans several other QZQ titles including Apartment of Death, SU, Hyperspace, and Sector 49. That is worth knowing before you commit: you are buying into a serialized world, not a complete standalone experience. The good news is that the studio has actually delivered on subsequent episodes, so this is not an early access ghost town. The small but unanimous player reception so far suggests the audience that finds this game tends to stick with it. The rough edges are real. Production values are modest, and the English localization occasionally shows the strain of translation from Chinese source text. Some environmental details are sparse in ways that feel like budget constraints rather than intentional minimalism. For players who prioritize polish, these things will chafe. For players who read between the lines of a handcrafted world and hear the developer's voice in every weird case file, those same limitations become texture. What stays with me is the tone. QZQ knows how to build dread through stillness. The desolate forest, the clinical forensic details, the sense that something genuinely strange happened here and the authorities are not equipped to explain it. There is a restrained, almost documentary quality to how the horror is delivered, and that restraint is harder to achieve than jump scares. If you have any tolerance for slow-burn mystery in the vein of analog horror or Chinese supernatural procedural fiction, this is worth the asking price for episode one alone.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on With in the Obscurity.