Before I get to my review of Penumbra: Overture I just wanted to let you guys know some good news, I now have an agent! Now that that's out of the way on to the review.
Penumbra: Overture is the previous foray into horror by the team behind Amnesia. It takes place in an arctic mining facility that has been around for decades, but has fallen into disrepair, presumably due to some supernatural presence. From this game you can tell right off the bat that Frictional Games really know what makes for great horrifying atmosphere. It's similar to Amnesia in that the best strategy to survive is avoiding the enemies, some of which are capable of breaking down doors. You can fight back in this one however, just not very effectively due to how hard it is to control any of the weapons you find. We kept talking about how we wished we had a gun.
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| I've never been so afraid of a dog before. |
Now unfortunately this game had a lot of things going against it. Firstly it was just too long and unless you had a walkthrough to read at the same time some of the puzzles made no sense or were just silly. For instance at one point you had to get past an electric fence, you would think there would be a way to turn it off or something, but nope you literally just had to stack boxes and jump over it (my idea, which my guy thought was going to kill us, especially since a tiny bit of steam can kill you in this game). There were also some parts of the game that took way too many tries to get through and I swear we died at least 10 times trying to get past some spiders.
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| Apparently spider eggs have built in motion sensors that tell them when to hatch. |
The real nail in the coffin for this game though was when we were trying to figure out how to solve one of the puzzles, tried a bunch of stuff, relented and used the walk through then when we did what we were supposed to have done it still wouldn't let us advance because of what we had tried to do to solve it. The weird physics of this game meant that we were stuck in this room with no way to get out without turning off the game and hoping it hadn't saved. At that point we gave up, while the story had been fairly interesting it just wasn't worth the frustration we were having. Overall I wouldn't recommend this game because of how frustrating it was. That being said I am curious as to what SOMA will be like once Frictional releases it in a few months.
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| Were they mining spice all this time? |
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