bad dog

Okay so the game makes it clear but this is the first part of a series, so if you buy this and like it, expect to buy the sequel aswell.

As a horror game, Penumbra's just OK, it's got some cool atmosphere, some simple yet good puzzles and seemingly no apparent bugs.
I will say that the atmosphere comment is by far the biggest praise I have for this game, while I have issues with the lighting, not for the reasons you'd expect, it's actually FAR too bright to the point where I never had to use any of the lighting tools the game gave me, and this with gamma reduced. the actual environments themselves are interesting enough. Delving deeper into a bunker, turned mineshaft, turned research facility felt pretty unnerving at points. All the different notes, environmental objects, etc. really help give this place a good bit of history that helps sell the setting.

Game's lacking in characters for obvious reasons but I did enjoy the small bit of company they did provide, the wasn't hostile of course. Won't go into it for spoilers but it gives the game a nice bit of flavour.

Sounds design was fine overall, but it's a bit easy to tell when a sound is just on repeat to mess with you for ambience instead of actually being something in the environment meant to scare you, but it's alright.


The number one issue I had was technical, game doesn't have a borderless windowed option so alt-tabbing is a nightmare if you find yourself having to do this. The game does not have options beyond 1080p resolution aswell. Easy fix for this is to go into the games settings.cfg in My Documents/Penumbra: Overture and find the line in there that'll let you alter the in-game resolution to match your native resolution. As for the alt-tabbing issue, I used Borderless Fullscreen which worked flawlessly.

The combat is waaaaaay to janky for my liking. Survival horror games usually don't have great combat, especially melee combat, but Penumbra's jankier than most. Thrusting feels useless, knockdowns can be abused albeit somewhat inconsistently and I could never really gauge the range on swinging my weapon, didn't really enjoy it.

The enemy AI is atrocious. The main consistent threat throughout the game are dogs, but they are not very threatening. They lose interest very easily, they have the ability to call for backup which works SO inconsistently that it just wastes your time more than anything else whenever they run off and if you want an easy way to deal with them, they cannot hit you when you are slightly elevated, like on a box or barrel, by crouching, you can hit them very easily when they lunge at you. They do not respawn, they're not all that numerous, they just waste my time and stealth is so barebones and easy to do that I found it way more enjoyable to just clear out the area so I can run around to my hearts content.

This game was quite the Experience!

I like how it sets up its plot in properly making you wonder what happened in the past and it helps you guide onwards into the game, which is always a way to get me to like any game. All Puzzles were logic puzzles that weren't that much of a drag to figure out except two near the end, which one I think I just didn't understand it and just guessed, and the other one felt like a test of memory, which is not one of my strongsuits, hehe...

Only downside of this game is its combat, which was very easy to figure out and break. I get that the point of the game is to use Combat as a last resort, but when using a simple move to destroy everything without much worry makes it seem like your first resort. The Dogs felt Dangerous but not Dangerous enough, and that is all I'll say to avoid spoilers.

With that though, I say this game is a great little 6 hour experience for anyone that loves Horror, especially like Amnesia, and with how often the Penumbra Collection is on sale for like $3, I'm sure anyone could give this game at least a chance.