Sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't know very much about how Perl works. Here's the description of how it obfuscates.

The obfuscation means:

• replacing all symbol names it's possible to with the non-meaningfull ones, e.g. replacing @files with @zcadaa4fc81, while preserving synaxical and semantical correctness of the source code. Of course predefined symbols like @ARGV and symbols from the third-party or standard Perl modules the perl source code uses will be left the same so the obfuscated code will still work without requiring to obfuscate those third-party or standard Perl modules
• substitution of numeric values with the arithmetic expressions using (random or constant for the same numeric value as requested by the options) decimial and hexadecimial numeric values that evaluate to the same value
• using hexadecimial character codes for all characters in strings
• replacing strings with interpolated variables with the concatenation of the appropriate components
• adding extra parenthesis for the expressions
• removing extra white spaces
• jamming as much code on each line as possible

Most of them sound like they can be undone trivally with perltidy and/or B::Deparse.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg