Kenny Matthews

"I don't believe it... It's happening again! At the college I was at, two years ago, students died from crap like this... And I suppose what we just killed was a local myth, was it?"

- Kenny to Amy in ObsCure II

Kenny Matthews is a major playable character in ObsCure and ObsCure II. He was the captain of the basketball team of Leafmore High called the Sharks and quarterback for the football team of Fallcreek University.

Due to being fit, he can run faster and he can move heavy objects, making him the strongest (besides Sven) of his friends. Just like Stan, Josh and Ashley, Kenny has to take pills to keep the spores at bay after the events of the first game.

Personality
Kenny is very athletic, physically strong and full of energy. He is the fastest runner and the strongest out of the original five survivors, as he is able to push heavy object much faster than anyone else. He is popular due to being the basketball captain and an average student grade-wise.

After he is locked in the school, he pursuits a thief, who stole his backpack and follows him into to the basement of a house behind the school's gardens, showing strong signs of courage and little to no fear. When he discovers Dan, he offers to help him.

He does have a few negative traits though. He gets annoyed pretty easily, as right at the start of the game, he gets very annoyed of Josh, whom he accidentally bumps into while playing basketball and tells him to get out of the way. He is also pretty cocky, as he does not listen to his sister, Shannon Matthews, who reminds him that he promised their parents, he'd be home early. He also shrugs her off, by saying that he told their parents he'd be home early, but not to her, showing he doesn't really respect his parents. He can be irresponsible, as he has been late to a date with his girlfriend, Ashley. His profile claims he should not view basketball as the only subject worthy of his interest, and that he has a quarrelsome attitude.

Two years after the events of the first game, he is still shown to be pretty cocky. He maintains his tough guy persona, but beneath hides a very weak character. His irresponsibility finally gets the best of him, as he smokes a flower on the campus, even though Shannon forbid him and he runs out of his medicine that he used to treat his infection from Mortifilia. He shows that, despite his physical strength, he is much weaker as a character. He panics when he can't find any of his pills, he calls Shannon to be the tough one in the family, and easily succumbs to Mortifilia spores.

Aptitude
Kenny is a great runner. Using his ability will give the player a speed boost, which is very useful on hard mode, where the player needs to preserve ammo. After a few seconds of running, he will slow down to his normal speed. If he stops after using all of his running ability, he will pant for a few seconds, before regaining his speed boost again.

In the second game, he doesn't appear to have his speed boost anymore. Instead, the game focuses on his strength, a trait he shares with a fellow survivor, Sven Hanson. He is able to push really heavy objects, that the players can use as a stepping stone or to free a passageway.

Leafmore Incident
At the beginning of the game, Kenny is playing basketball with a few friends (including Stan) while Shannon and Josh watch. When everyone leaves, he is led to a locker room to check his ringing phone. It was a call from his girlfriend Ashley, telling him not to be late for their date. While Kenny's back was turned, someone takes his backpack. He chases after the figure, going through the school's previously unknown garden and into a kind of shed. The sounds of monsters coming from a nearby shaft makes him nervous and he grabs a nearby pistol and tapes a flashlight to it. He then climbs down the shaft via ladder.



He goes down a dark hallway with pipes and large bleeding blood roots coming from the walls. At the end of the hallway, he encounters a door blocked by a large cloud of Black Spores. Using the flashlight that was taped to his pistol, he eliminates the Spores and enters the door. The room he enters in had many cages, boxes, and medical supplies. At the far end of the room, he finds a light and enters a door to its source. He enters the unlocked door of this new room, and finds a sickly young man named Dan. The two venture back the way Kenny had entered. As they get halfway into the room full of cages and boxes, a nearby supposedly locked door bursts open and a large monster with meaty arms and sharp claws, along with some strange smaller creatures appear. Both Kenny and Dan make their way to the other side of the room. In their running, Dan is cut down by a large monster leaving Kenny alone on his escape. When he finally makes it down the hall to the ladder, the shaft hole is closed up, trapping Kenny.

Later it can be seen via camera that he is trapped in the laboratory that is below the school. The group manages to find Kenny in the cell block, and Kenny says that they have to get him out of here before Friedman comes, but then he appears and knocks them all down with a smoke grenade. When they wake up and open the cells, Kenny says that they have to ask the nurse where the antidote is, and find it before the sun rises, if not, they will die and transform into monsters.

They eventually find the nurse, but she is bleeding, and in agony. She says that the serum is in the lab, and that Herbert has it. The boys find some statuettes throughout the school, when they get to the lab, they found another big monster that custodies the mechanism that needs the statuettes, and kill it. When they put the statuettes on the disposition, Kenny, Josh, Stanley, Ashley and Shannon realizes that they need a switch to put to make it work. They obviously found it and use it on the machine. Then a door opens and it can be seen that Walden is pointing a gun at Friedman. Walden demanded of Friedman to give him the antidote, Herbert said that it was too late, that Walden was already mutating. Walden doesn't listen and shoots Herbert, but is killed by Leonard.



The team gets there, they find Walden's bag full of ammo, and battle Leonard. Later, Leonard seems to be dead. They climb up to the surface floor of a wrecked school gym and inject themselves with the antidote. Suddenly Leonard comes out from the underground wreckage of the school gym and is defeated at once by the sunlight while the team defended itself from his attacks in the meantime. Kenny kisses with Ashley, while Stan goes to grab the briefcase but then it makes a sound, and Stan jumps aside, and dodges, and shoots his gun.

Fallcreek Outbreak
Two years after the events of Leafmore, Kenny enrolled in the University of Fallcreek with his sister Shannon. After Friedman's infection, the boy became totally addicted to the medicines to make up for the mutation and was thus forced to take a large daily quantity. Shannon, who resists the mutation thanks to her will, tries to help him as she can, by taking charge of the insecurities that Kenny manifests only with her. After breaking up his relationship with Ashley, Kenny begins to take an interest in Amy Brookes, one of the most desired girls on the campus who, however, is torn between Kenny's swagger and the more serious attitude of Sven Hansen, hockey player university. Thanks to his physical prowess, Kenny becomes the quarterback of the local football team the Fallcreek Pitbulls, thus managing to obtain a discreet circle of friends, towards whom, however, he does not express himself completely being still very weakened by the experience at Leafmore.

After some time, however, several black flowers begin to bloom on the university campus, blooming only at night, as if they feared the light. Students have no qualms about using these plants as a light drug and even Kenny gets carried away by this fashion, despite Shannon trying to prevent it. With friends Sven, Amy, Corey, Mei and Jun he decides to take part in an exclusive party, reserved only for the wealthiest students, of the ΔΘГ brotherhood which celebrates his two hundredth year. So he presents himself at the party of February 23 together with Amy. However, not being in the company of the twins Wang, who know the members of the brotherhood, the two are rejected by the bouncer and are forced to enter the headquarters of the ΔΘГ through a window on the first floor.

In the meantime, however, the black flowers on campus bloom totally releasing massive doses of Mortifilia which pour on all those who had abused the new drug. Kenny and Amy make their way through the changed students of the party thanks to a gun found in the billiard room and reach a library where they meet Prof Richard James. They are subsequently joined by Mei and Corey (they too arrived at the party too late) and, together with the latter, Kenny manages to reach the exit of the building. Outside they meet Sven, at the same time a student about to change steals Corey's car to escape and the latter chases him through the woods with Amy while Mei and Sven return to campus to help Jun, who is trapped in her dormitory. Kenny, however, is affected by a malaise for having tried the drug and for being abstinent from the drugs, so he calls his sister and goes to the hospital to find medicine.

There, neither himself, nor Shannon, can find any and the girl tries to convince Kenny that it is her will that makes the difference. Unfortunately, the boy gives in and lets Mortifilia get the better by covering an entire floor of the campus hospital with black spores. Thanks to her new faculties of control over evil spores, Shannon manages to escape and, while she is still changing, Kenny calls her with inhuman screams. He then turns into a deformed monster and ambushes the group of surviving students in the hospital warehouse and, after having stunned Amy, Sven and Richard, has a brief confrontation with Corey and Mei.

He then manages to skewer Corey on a protruding iron and crushes the girl's head before his eyes. Before he can do anything else, however, Shannon and Stan intervene, contacted by the girl, who manage to force Kenny to flee. However, the monster is far from defeated and reaches the group at the Fallcreek dam, where he kidnaps Amy, while the others are stunned by a car accident (except Shannon and Stan who had left to verify that the place was safe). The group of students reached him in the engine room of the dam and here Kenny has a clash with Shannon and Corey who manage, through the use of some levers to release large metal components, to crush the monster inside a pipeline. Kenny, however, does not die and reaches Corey at the stadium, when the sun has risen, while he was trying to save Amy from the ΔΘГ. Here he tries to convince her to join him, presenting that destiny as the only feasible; Corey, however, exhausted by the horrors experienced, says that the only one to which he will belong to forever is Mei and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. The scene is also attended by Shannon and Stan, the last two survivors, who engage in a final deadly clash with Kenny. He will be killed by an iron structure that the two will make him fall on him. With his last words, Kenny asks Shannon to look after his offspring but this assures him that he will kill any monster born of Amy.

Monster Kenny
In the hospital, and due to the flowers weakening him and his lack of suppressing drugs and willpower, he succumbs to the infection and transforms into a monster, becoming one of the major antagonists in the game, becoming the most frequently fought boss throughout the game. He seems to have keep most of his intelligence, though he is rendered completely insane.

The infection has the better of his will and turns him into a grotesque being endowed with intelligence and the ability to express himself, but totally devoid of humanity. In this guise, Kenny, intoxicated with his new force, reveals a dark and cruel side amplified by the Mortifilia feeding his insanity with the aggressiveness that the mutation provokes and frees a macabre perversion to all those who were once his friends.

His upper limbs grow to allow him to rest directly on these rather than on the legs, on his chest it opens a hole, while the rest of the body, though evidently changed, stays with a human appearance, particularly the facial features. His strength and his agility are increased dramatically allowing him to propel on the walls, move and jump more quickly by relying on his huge arms. In this state, Kenny can generate clouds of dark spores that become solid to throw at enemies with his hands causing average damage, but due to the "solidness" they can't infect others. At close range, he can attack with his upper limbs.

He can survive direct sunlight, as the final battle with him is set at dawn, but it should be noted that the light weakens him. This can be proved by certain factors:

In his 2nd battle he was crushed by a what appears to be a submarine propeller, which weigh equally, or a bit less than the reflectors of the stadium, and falls a great height with it on his back. Yet, he was not only able to survive that, but to recover in a span of a few hours, but in the last battle, set in the sunset, he is crushed by another heavy metal object, but this time, it delivers a fatal blow. It is important to note that the weight of the reflectors was distributed in 4 parts; Kenny being one and the other 3 would be the ground, so the weight applied on him, would be theoretically damaging, but less than the power generated by the crush of the propeller in the Dam.

He seems to be able to mutate further than the form showed in the hospital, as his appearance has been changed in the last battle on the stadium. There is no explanation of the further mutation, but it can be theorized in 2 ways:


 * He mutates after a great amount of sustained damage, regenerating the missing cells and creating new ones. This can be explained by the fact that he was crushed on his back, where he had a little tail coming out from his "hump", and after the mutation a "claw-ending tentacle" was sticking out of the very same spot in Kenny's hump.
 * Or, his 2nd form was the one meant to be, as the "tentacle upper limb" took time to develop.

Death


Kenny is killed by Stan and Shannon in retaliation for him killing Mei, raping Amy, and causing Corey to commit suicide. He is killed when the lamp for the University stadium falls and crushes him. After his death, the helicopter is seen flying away, and Amy gives birth. The helicopter then explodes, and Shannon and Stan go to investigate the crash to see if anyone is alive. Shannon also tells Stan she is cutting ties with her family, to avoid what their possible reaction would be when she told them she killed Kenny.

Trivia

 * Kenny's age is somewhat questionable, as he seems a bit too old to be a high school senior. He was born June 1984 (and the only of the main cast born this year), and the first game is set September 2003 according to the School Newspaper. This means that he is 19 during the first game and would be graduating high school in 2004 around the age of 20 when summer vacation starts. This suggests he may have been held back a year or two during his life.
 * In the first game, if a player is runs for a while, the characters will mention Kenny's ability by saying "I'm exhausted! Kenny is a much better runner!".
 * He's the only character who will not say anything while using his aptitude.
 * He's the only playable character who has mutated.
 * He's the oldest playable character.
 * He's the only one of the Leafmore Survivors who is confirmed to be dead.
 * If Kenny kills an enemy, he may say "Astalavista, baby" which is wrongly prompted in the game's subtitles. This is a quote from Terminator 2 (the right way to say it would be "Hasta la vista, baby").
 * In the second game, he has the least amount of potential partners out of all the main characters, with only 3 (Amy, Corey and Mei), while all other main characters have at least 4 or more potential partners.