After picking up a new PC, I’ve started collecting a few gems in PC gaming. I’ve always loved adventure style games (Myst, King’s Quest, etc etc), and this style of game is sorely lacking on consoles. The best part about poking the dark corners of adventure gaming is that you’re bound to find a few hidden gems. The first gem I’ve found is Penumbra: Black Plague. I’m trying to get ahold of the first game in the series, Penumbra: Overture, but these things are hard to find.
Penumbra is a first person adventure game, with a robust physics system that seems far superior in normal tactile manipulation to something like Havok, which Half Life and other modern games used. The developers, Frictional games, consist of 3 people. The physics system was coded by them and my favorite part is that everything feels heavy. Things don’t just skitter about the room after a collision.
There’s very little actual combat, as you spend your time trying to hide and sneak around the creatures in the games, sometimes setting up traps. The gameplay is very puzzle based. In the first room you have to pick up a coin and put it in a vice to squash it flat in order to use it to open up the grate to the ventilation system so you can crawl out of your cell.
Just note that it is a Horror game. It’s scary… really scary. So many horror games have far too much confrontation, thus dulling the impact of survival. In real life you’re most scared when harm is imminent or even being done to your person. In games seeing harm done to your person isn’t as scary since it immediately breaks the suspension of disbelief in the world you’re inhabiting. By that… this game is really really scary. It relies a great deal on fear of the unknown, good sound design, and the weak position of your character trying to hide from the horrors in the game. Most computers should be able to handle the game as well. There’s a demo here.
A video here.
I’m going to have to pick up the first game as well.
Tags: adventure,games,scary
Categories: BJ, Entertainment
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