KingGorilla
05-01-2007, 01:26 AM
Penumbra Overture: Episode 1 (http://www.penumbra-overture.com/)
First the main bullet points.
Penumbra is a game made up of a trilogy of episodes.
It is a first person perspective title
Adventure game
There is not much combat
But plenty of puzzles and problems to solve.
An unobservant person may classify this as a horror game(it is more thriller)
IE, think David Fincher(Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club), not John Carpenter.
The Good:
The game is 20 dollars and has a free demo. You can download it or buy it retail. As of the writing of this review, April 30th, it is only available as a download. It hits stores May 7th in North America, is already in stores in many European nations(UK, France, Germany, Italy) and hits stores in the rest of Europe May 11th.
If you are a fan of adventure games, you will like this one. It can be as punitive and difficult or as easy as you like. And thus far the problems and solutions are fairly simple for those used to adventure game conventions.
The controls are rather innovative. Those who are fans of Indigo Prophecy(or Fahrenheit in Europe) will appreciate the gesture based interface. You click on a door, and pull back the mouse to open it, or rotate a wheel around to open a valve. To break open a box you equip a hammer and swing the hammer with the mouse. It makes it a tad more immersive, but more importantly it means that the game is not just a click-fest. It helps break up the general monotony that adventure games suffer from.
The system requirements are rather modest as well:
Minimum Requirements:
OS: Windows 2000/XP
Processor: 1Ghz CPU
Memory: 256MB RAM
Disc Space: 300MB Free Hard-drive space
Video Card: ATI Radeon 8500/NVIDIA GeForce 3 (GeForce4MX not supported)
So there are plenty of people who will be able to play this. But be warned that the demo is pretty rough, there are a lot of clipping issues, visible seams in the levels, that have been fixed in the final versions.
The Bad:
The game is not the prettiest girl at the ball. And the art style is rather drab. It features what I like to call the id color palette. Lots of black, brown, gray tones. There is a lot, and I mean a lot of reading to do as well. I do not mind this so much, but in this modern age many gamers are put off by a lot of reading. The cut scenes are voice acted; albeit in a rather drab and dry British tone. I give the voice acting a slight pass because of the amateur nature of the project. And, admittedly, I have a soft spot for independent games as well as a forgiving nature for their foibles. It also features that Metroid-vania staple mechanic; you are constantly back-tracking to a door that you could not open before, or an area where you left a switch with a missing lever, etc. So you often find yourself going from room to room and back again with a new key, or tool to open up a new area.
Many may be put off by the lack of any real combat. But it is an adventure game mind you, combat is not why you pay the price of admission. For my likes, I would appreciate better physics as well. There is a decent amount of tossing objects around, and they pretty much just fall and thud, without much behavior to them.
You will find yourself in rooms looking in some less than intuitive spots with classic adventure game cues(eyeball means look, hand means grab, etc.). So if you get stuck in a spot you will find yourself going from wall to wall scouring the room for a visual cue for that one object that you need in order to progress.
The Fantastic:
Crud voice acting aside, the ambiance of the game is spectacular. The audio setting of the game and the tension that it builds is very well done. The story is rather original, and very European in its convention. Where the American style of game story prefer to just toss the player and protagonist into the middle of a story(Halo, Half-Life, Gears of War), this game prefers to begin at the...well the beginning. Your mother has just died and you receive a letter from your father, a man whom you have never met. This man abandoned your mother before you were even born. And you must unravel a mystery of his disappearance...or abandonment of his wife and unborn son. And the gamer has to take for granted that this journey of discovery must take place, and that the main character must forsake his life to learn of a man whom he has never met. It is called suspending your disbelief people.
The Perplexing:
For some reason, the sneaking mechanic features the blue haze vision of Richard B. Riddick of Escape from Butcher Bay stardom. A necessary mechanic as you have to sneak around in the dark to avoid enemies(again not much fighting to be had) but why you have superhuman night vision is beyond me. There are also 3 different room lighting mechanics-A flashlight with a dwindling battery(you must find batteries to keep it running), a glow stick(that is seemingly endless in life-span), and a lighter(for lighting kerosene lamps). But, they all seem to serve the same purpose. And given the aforementioned night-vision, you will find yourself sneaking with that rather than walking with a flashlight or glow stick with very limited aid from either.
Conclusion:
I think that this one is worth buying. It is not going to blow you away with graphics. It is not the most intriguing art style, the caves in Oblivion featured more variation than the caves in the first level of Penumbra. It is rather conventional in its adventure game mechanics, but it operates on a consistent and rather intuitive logic. Some solutions to puzzles or problems are literally written is big capital letters. It is a very fun adventure game, the story is well written and it unravels at a good pace. There are some very thrilling moments, not scary like say Condemned, but thrilling. Again, think Fincher not Carpenter. There is building tension and skillful use of audio. “Is that dog still around here? I better lean around the corner to check; eww a spider...AWW I can hear them scampering around in here...that last one was fricking huge. What the hell was that scream? Where did all of this blood come from? What is your name, What is your quest, What is the average air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?...sorry, got carried away.”
Buyer beware though, I downloaded Penumbra from the Gamersgate site. Steam, it is not. It is not a user friendly experience. And since I have no experience using Strategy Informer as a download service, I cannot tell you if it is better.
But for Gamersgate.
You register at the site.
You pay for the download at PayPal.
You then get an e-mail as a receipt.
You download the Gamersgate client(at no point in any of the above steps was this mentioned)
You download Penumbra via the client(on the bright side I think I got it downloaded in about an hour and a half).
You install Penumbra
BUT WAIT, now you have to go back to the client and copy in a serial number. I wish there were a rational reason for you entering a CD key for a digital download game...but OK.
The client crashes, and you wonder if the game is working.
You go to the shortcut for Penumbra, and it magically works, despite the previous crash.
First the main bullet points.
Penumbra is a game made up of a trilogy of episodes.
It is a first person perspective title
Adventure game
There is not much combat
But plenty of puzzles and problems to solve.
An unobservant person may classify this as a horror game(it is more thriller)
IE, think David Fincher(Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club), not John Carpenter.
The Good:
The game is 20 dollars and has a free demo. You can download it or buy it retail. As of the writing of this review, April 30th, it is only available as a download. It hits stores May 7th in North America, is already in stores in many European nations(UK, France, Germany, Italy) and hits stores in the rest of Europe May 11th.
If you are a fan of adventure games, you will like this one. It can be as punitive and difficult or as easy as you like. And thus far the problems and solutions are fairly simple for those used to adventure game conventions.
The controls are rather innovative. Those who are fans of Indigo Prophecy(or Fahrenheit in Europe) will appreciate the gesture based interface. You click on a door, and pull back the mouse to open it, or rotate a wheel around to open a valve. To break open a box you equip a hammer and swing the hammer with the mouse. It makes it a tad more immersive, but more importantly it means that the game is not just a click-fest. It helps break up the general monotony that adventure games suffer from.
The system requirements are rather modest as well:
Minimum Requirements:
OS: Windows 2000/XP
Processor: 1Ghz CPU
Memory: 256MB RAM
Disc Space: 300MB Free Hard-drive space
Video Card: ATI Radeon 8500/NVIDIA GeForce 3 (GeForce4MX not supported)
So there are plenty of people who will be able to play this. But be warned that the demo is pretty rough, there are a lot of clipping issues, visible seams in the levels, that have been fixed in the final versions.
The Bad:
The game is not the prettiest girl at the ball. And the art style is rather drab. It features what I like to call the id color palette. Lots of black, brown, gray tones. There is a lot, and I mean a lot of reading to do as well. I do not mind this so much, but in this modern age many gamers are put off by a lot of reading. The cut scenes are voice acted; albeit in a rather drab and dry British tone. I give the voice acting a slight pass because of the amateur nature of the project. And, admittedly, I have a soft spot for independent games as well as a forgiving nature for their foibles. It also features that Metroid-vania staple mechanic; you are constantly back-tracking to a door that you could not open before, or an area where you left a switch with a missing lever, etc. So you often find yourself going from room to room and back again with a new key, or tool to open up a new area.
Many may be put off by the lack of any real combat. But it is an adventure game mind you, combat is not why you pay the price of admission. For my likes, I would appreciate better physics as well. There is a decent amount of tossing objects around, and they pretty much just fall and thud, without much behavior to them.
You will find yourself in rooms looking in some less than intuitive spots with classic adventure game cues(eyeball means look, hand means grab, etc.). So if you get stuck in a spot you will find yourself going from wall to wall scouring the room for a visual cue for that one object that you need in order to progress.
The Fantastic:
Crud voice acting aside, the ambiance of the game is spectacular. The audio setting of the game and the tension that it builds is very well done. The story is rather original, and very European in its convention. Where the American style of game story prefer to just toss the player and protagonist into the middle of a story(Halo, Half-Life, Gears of War), this game prefers to begin at the...well the beginning. Your mother has just died and you receive a letter from your father, a man whom you have never met. This man abandoned your mother before you were even born. And you must unravel a mystery of his disappearance...or abandonment of his wife and unborn son. And the gamer has to take for granted that this journey of discovery must take place, and that the main character must forsake his life to learn of a man whom he has never met. It is called suspending your disbelief people.
The Perplexing:
For some reason, the sneaking mechanic features the blue haze vision of Richard B. Riddick of Escape from Butcher Bay stardom. A necessary mechanic as you have to sneak around in the dark to avoid enemies(again not much fighting to be had) but why you have superhuman night vision is beyond me. There are also 3 different room lighting mechanics-A flashlight with a dwindling battery(you must find batteries to keep it running), a glow stick(that is seemingly endless in life-span), and a lighter(for lighting kerosene lamps). But, they all seem to serve the same purpose. And given the aforementioned night-vision, you will find yourself sneaking with that rather than walking with a flashlight or glow stick with very limited aid from either.
Conclusion:
I think that this one is worth buying. It is not going to blow you away with graphics. It is not the most intriguing art style, the caves in Oblivion featured more variation than the caves in the first level of Penumbra. It is rather conventional in its adventure game mechanics, but it operates on a consistent and rather intuitive logic. Some solutions to puzzles or problems are literally written is big capital letters. It is a very fun adventure game, the story is well written and it unravels at a good pace. There are some very thrilling moments, not scary like say Condemned, but thrilling. Again, think Fincher not Carpenter. There is building tension and skillful use of audio. “Is that dog still around here? I better lean around the corner to check; eww a spider...AWW I can hear them scampering around in here...that last one was fricking huge. What the hell was that scream? Where did all of this blood come from? What is your name, What is your quest, What is the average air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?...sorry, got carried away.”
Buyer beware though, I downloaded Penumbra from the Gamersgate site. Steam, it is not. It is not a user friendly experience. And since I have no experience using Strategy Informer as a download service, I cannot tell you if it is better.
But for Gamersgate.
You register at the site.
You pay for the download at PayPal.
You then get an e-mail as a receipt.
You download the Gamersgate client(at no point in any of the above steps was this mentioned)
You download Penumbra via the client(on the bright side I think I got it downloaded in about an hour and a half).
You install Penumbra
BUT WAIT, now you have to go back to the client and copy in a serial number. I wish there were a rational reason for you entering a CD key for a digital download game...but OK.
The client crashes, and you wonder if the game is working.
You go to the shortcut for Penumbra, and it magically works, despite the previous crash.