amnesia good, this, not so much

https://www.thecerebralbore.com/2023/08/penumbra-overture-std2007.html

System Played: Steam Deck
Year Released: 2007
Year Reviewed: 2023


Penumbra: Overture is the debut release from Frictional Games, these days best known for the Amnesia series, which is what I was intending to finally play before seeing they’d done this previous “bunker horror”, so felt inclined to start here.


The story, such as it is, has some guy venturing off to a mine in remote Greenland to investigate his fathers mysterious past, and quickly finds himself trapped down there. Oops.


The game is first person perspective, designed for mouse + keyboard but maps well enough to the Deck controls (with a bit of mouse sensitivity tweaking in the Options).

The L+R Triggers stand in for left and right mouse click, L Stick to walk around, R Stick to look around (or the R Trackpad, which gives much more accuracy).

Movement speed in Overture is very slow. I wasn’t able to find a “run” button.

The engine seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from Valve’s Source, with held objects floating in front of you in a very similar style to Half-Life 2.

It takes things further (perhaps not for the better) requiring that instead of just clicking on objects like drawers or doors to open them, here you have to hold the mouse button and pull it down (towards you) or up (away from you), simulating the movement.

The controls do feel clunky, especially when it comes to offence.


The game only has a couple of “enemies”, in spiders, worms and these evil looking dogs.

The mechanics of swinging a hammer or pickaxe around work similarly, where you have to hold the mouse button down and pull back, then up to swing it. This is fine against planks of wood boarding up a door but considerably less effective against moving and aggressive enemies.

Fair enough, you’re supposed to sneak around and avoid enemies rather than take them on, but they’re so annoying that it’s almost worth the risk of trying to take them out rather than slowly sneaking around them constantly, though easier said than done.

Taking out a single enemy is difficult, not because they’re intelligent or unpredictable (they’re utterly predictable!), it’s because of “the clunk”. Dogs are the worst, since they call for backup. Trying to take out one at a time is bad enough! You’ve got no chance against multiple. Expect to die over and over and over.


The other element of Penumbra: Overture is puzzle solving.

Some just involve finding items (like keys) and then using them somewhere else.

Others are more physics-based, placing crates or planks in a certain config to allow you to reach higher platforms. Again, the mechanics of picking up and placing objects is a bit clunky.

Then there are more “logic” puzzles, which I’m not always the best at, but I didn’t find the ones in Penumbra to be particularly well designed/pitched.

At one point you need to interpret Morse code coming over a radio to work out the number combination on a keypad needed to progress. Maybe I missed some clue, but I couldn’t see any in-game explanation to translating this one, other than just knowing Morse code! …which I don’t. So it was walkthrough time for me!

The trick with these elements is to make the player feel smart that they worked it out. Here they were either so straightforward that I felt no accomplishment or so obtuse that I needed to consult a guide.


The backstory is mainly told through notes and diary pages scattered around. I didn’t find it to be an engaging storytelling technique on this occasion. There’s also some radio chatter from a crazy person. Which is all nonsensical.


Steam Deck Compatibility is listed as Playable, but it has one big issue in that the lighting doesn’t work. Being a horror game, the creepiness is impacted massively by the fact that you can see the patrolling dogs from a distance. The game relies pretty heavily on the fact that your vision is very limited, rationing out flares and torch batteries which were useless to me. The mine was lit up like a summer day!


Overture was at least mercifully short at 6 hours. But it wasn’t an enjoyable 6 hours.

It did say at the start it was going to be an episodic thing, literally ending with a “to be continued” message. By all accounts the next one, Black Plague, is supposed to be superior.


Clunky controls. Annoying enemies. Questionable puzzle design. Uninteresting/ unengaging story and setting… I can’t say I enjoyed Penumbra: Overture.

3/10

I mean for a low budget indy game, fine. Models are horrible. Combat is horrible, but in fairness they really expect you to use stealth. The story is not engaging. Puzzles are okay, but nothing to write home about. Not even kind of scary so I am unsure what other reviewers are on about. For the time I suppose interacting with objects was fairly innovative...maybe. A few bucks for a few hours? I dunno, there is so many other games that are better uses of time.

trash and annoying combat but sometimes decent puzzles

Unfortunately, I can't say I enjoyed this game much. Some pretty basic enemies, too much reading, and a general disinterest in the story led me to dislike the first part of this series. There were a couple of unique puzzles, but other negative aspects overshadowed them. It laid some solid foundations for Amnesia, but compared to those games, this felt poorly paced and made parts somewhat dull. I will, however, check out the next part of this game to see if there are any improvements.

What I played was cool, can definitely see that this is Amnesia's predecessor. But, the fact it has no controller support is really a big downside for me. I am a deskless laptop user so, yeah. It was tedious enough that I dropped the game before finishing it. Even with Steam controller support, a lot of the functions didn't work.

This has the potential for being a good game with an interesting beginning and puzzles to solve. Once you get to the lower level, forget it. Not being able to save when you wish coupled with two dogs that never let up makes the game tedious. I managed to kill one, then before I could explore the game's possibilities, another dog came. Imagine the fun you can have playing that level over and over and never progressing. I quit.

Don't bother, just watch a Youtube lets play

I guess we all have to start somewhere.

I thought I'd play through Frictional's first endeavor before the iconic Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but now can't help but think that was a mistake. Good atmosphere can only do so much. The puzzles are a disorienting headache of "put item here, not that one, not that one". But the combat is what's putting this on a hiatus for now. All it is is moving the mouse and hoping that the game decides that's one of the countless hits needed to kill an enemy. You, however, die in just two, and since getting attacked swings your perspective to a random location, you're dead before you can shift back your focus. This wouldn't be an issue if the game that advertises avoiding combat didn't require it constantly.

I appreciate Penumbra's place in the history of gaming, but as a game, well, despite playing for less than four hours, I sat down to play it five times, and every time closed it either out of boredom or frustration. I don't see that changing any time soon.

Penumbra Overture is a Survival Horror game that lacks any kind of horror.
Puzzles are rudimentary and uncreative and mostly consist of carrying objects from place to another place.
Controls, especially the combat sucks harder than any other game i have played. It makes you mimic the motion of hitting something with your mouse which as you can expect works terribly.
I had to drop the game because of its gameplay loop that consists of waiting for stupid dogs to go away, dying to those stupid dogs then doing the same stuff over and over again.
I neither got spooked or enjoyed solving the puzzles it offers so i don't think i ever will play it. Only reason i can think of why this game got very positive rating here is because its the developers of Amnesia's first game.
I highly suggest avoiding it. Might be fun to watch (which is what i'm planning to do) but it is awful to play.