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Serious games are a tricky business. It’s easy to fall short of the emotional impact needed to engage the player. It’s easy to be pompous or arrogant or boring. Even more difficult is then to entertain.
Penumbra: Overture is a first person horror puzzler from Frictional Games, developed on the back of their tech demo Penumbra. Following the story of Philip, you venture forth into the wilderness after receiving a letter from your long forgotten father:
Like all good nightmares, Philip’s begins with something all too real – his mother’s death. The days following the funeral are characterized by nothing, save for an incessant feeling of abandonment. Until, that is, he receives a letter from a dead man.
Philip’s father left before he was born, taking his reasons with him. Now, here he is, opening up the door from beyond the grave. That door leads to more questions, and those questions lead to Greenland. Philip follows the clues – they’re all he has left.
On leaving the final signs of human civilization behind him, in search of the location mentioned in his father’s ambiguous notes, Philip wonders if he’s left some part of his humanity behind as well. Soon, that will be the least of his fears.
Now, Philip needs your help. He’s found an inexplicable metal hatch, in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Inside, is something yet more unfathomable.
Thankfully Overture does not fall into the trap of being overly dramatic. Don’t get me wrong, Overture is a dramatic and fairly humourless game, but an interesting story combined with original and refreshing physics puzzles provides balance. It’s not light either. Themes are misery, isolation, loss, madness, fear. It’s not that Overture is even particularly violent. Violence serves the story or for survival, not for the sheer love of it.
I give credit to Frictional for aiming so high, even if at times it falls a little short. Combat is frustrating, but not without reason. Although Overture is an FPS, the emphasis is on your interaction with the environment not with the level of destruction you can unleash. The difficulty of combat is two fold: you need swing, prod or poke whatever you’re trying to attack and then you need to get over the fear that your character feels when looking at a nasty. If you look to long (especially when trying to hide) Philip will panic and bolt – alerting whatever was looking for you to your position.
At times Overture lacks polish; there are a few mistakes in text, some puzzles are confusing or a little mindless. However, genuinely frightening moments and atmospheric locales make a largely compelling game. I didn’t find the various nasties wandering around that frightening. What struck the fear of God into me was an ominous looking abandoned cement mixer. Most of the world is in gloom and you require a torch or glowstick to see. When wandering around an abandoned mineshaft, any object that looms out the darkness could be a potential horror. It just so happened that my horror was a long forgotten piece of building machinery! In this way, tension is built skillfully and carefully in Overture.
Although Overture can at times feel like a prelude, it is something I recommend playing. Ultimately Overture provides you with something you’ll not find elsewhere – original frights with a high level of production. Considering the price – a tenner – you can’t really go wrong.
