Beware of Penumbra!
Penumbra: Overture is fun if you are not scared of the dark
Penumbra: Overture is fun if you are not scared of the dark.
Penumbra: Overture was developed as a demonstration to showcase new techniques for immersing players in a game. The demonstration was extremely successful, and it was developed into a commercial product.
The demonstration was extremely successful, and it was developed into a commercial product. It offers about 12 hours of what could be considered fun gameplay if you weren't scared out of your mind the entire time.
Penumbra: Overture should come with a warning label for anyone with a weak heart or who's easily frightened. It does its best to get into your head, and it is scary. You play Philip, who receives a request from his deadbeat father to retrieve and destroy documents from a bank. The documents show the location of a secret Arctic facility, which Philip decides to go explore.
Finding a mysterious hatch leading into the ice, you are quickly trapped underground in an abandoned military facility full of long-dead secrets and not-so-long-dead creatures. But this isn't another run-and-gun title like Doom 3 with monsters jumping out of cabinets.
The horror in Penumbra is subtler, at least at first. The game indicates how Philip feels by increasing breathing sounds and using other audio cues. Add excellent graphics and you'll find more than one of your senses screaming at your brain that you are in danger.
You have to manipulate your environment quite a bit. Using the mouse cursor, you must pull levers, open drawers, shove boxes and even swing hammers at monsters as you navigate the half-light maze of drab underground corridors and delve deeper into the mysteries of the facility.
The puzzles and monsters seem to fit naturally with the story. Even combat is designed for the intelligent player, with monsters being much easier to kill if you can trap them or trick them into a less advantageous situation, which can be done with bait or moving objects. You can also sneak by most hostile creatures, avoiding combat if you don't mind putting a few enemies at your back.
It's hard to play Penumbra without turning on some lights, both in the game and in your home.
Penumbra: Overture comes with a teen rating and is available on the PC platform.
