by
Haha… well, played in completely the wrong order by me, I finally get the conclusion of the Penumbra series in the form of…
–Spoiler Alert–
I’m going to be referencing the key plots of this and the other two Penumbra games throughout this article, so if you want a chance to play them spoiler free, stop reading here.
When I bought the packet of Penumbra games, I was under the impression that they were all standalone games. I never realized that they were in fact a set of 3 linear titles. So I played them in one of the oddest orders possible BECAUSE I’M HARDCORE… I guess. I started with the one in the middle, Penumbra Black Plague. I thought had a weird ending but was an excellent game in its entirety. You played as some seemingly random guy who picks up an alien infestation in his brain that talks to him. He calls himself “Clarence” from his host’s memories of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and antagonizes you as much as he helps you.
Ultimately he toys with your mind, forcing you to see hallucinations causing you to kill a female scientist you were trying to rescue. Eventually you cleanse Clarence out of your body but he hops into a corpse where he gives a last-ditch effort to to assassinate you. He’s eradicated by the… hive mind(?) though, who apologizes for Clarence’s actions. The hive explains that every entity of the alien race functions as one, but for some reason Clarence (my theory is that he was influenced by the singular minds of the humans) broke away from the collective to cause trouble. The alien race then tests you, trying to teach you and by extension humanity to ascend to a greater level of existence.
Passing the trials and having his mind opened to the higher ways of living and respecting all life, the main character is returned to the compound unharmed, the hive hoping that he would be the spark that revolutionizes humanity. The game ends with the main character writing a seemingly normal letter to a colleague, explaining all the miraculous things he learned. Then at the end, he coldly types for them to come and find them here and “Kill them. Kill them all.”
Very happy with my first exposure, I put in Penumbra: Overture… which as chance would have it was the first in the series. You can imagine that many gaps in the story of the second title were filled in and the focus of the hallucinations that Clarence inflicted on the main character made much more sense after this. So as it happens, the story of Penumbra begins with the same character from its sequel, running around in some sort of military base in Antarctica looking for your dad. During your playthrough, you discover that the base had uncovered an alien artifact/race and it began mutating animals and driving people insane. At some point I want to say that you uncover your father’s suicide and the one human left in the compound forces you to kill him in order to proceed. It’s not as good as the second, but has some decently scenes and tricky puzzles. Trying to cross the frozen lake was certainly a trial, along with… invisible things that crawl out of holes in the wall.
All that being said, I was excited to pop in Penumbra: Requiem, to finally have the conclusion to the series. Look, these aren’t long games but… why does Requiem have so much darn platforming and box pushing? From a series that brought me giant killer earthworms, psychotic personalities invading my psyche and killer alien dogs, the first two hours of Requiem were box pushing platforming puzzles. The whole thing was disheartening. I probably don’t need to tell you, but Penumbra’s engine was not really built for platforming. Jumping is clunky and rigid and flight in midair is neigh unchangeable, adopting a more realistic approach to physics as opposed to not.
The most platform intensive section of Overture (the first title) was when you had to find a way across a frozen lake. Creatively, you had to demolish a nearby shed by throwing any object into it to break off pieces of wood which then could be laid out on the ice to evenly distribute your weight. It was a bit frustrating at times to figure out where the appropriate place to lay out the wood was but it was fun because it was a clever enough puzzle that constantly built tension in the player in their fear of falling into the icy waters to their death. Comparatively, requiem has you pushing, pulling and throwing a dozen or so identical-looking boxes through a series of platforms that would make even Mario envious.
To make it worse, in order to progress from one “level” to the next, you have to acquire enough McGuffin tokens to open up the portal at the end of a level. After spending what felt like an eternity stacking boxes and climbing ten stories through a particularly vertical platforming-Hell level, I found the portal and came up one McGuffin token short, left only with the option of jumping all the way down back to the bottom to search for the token, deconstructing all the box-stacking work I had constructed to get there. There might be some sort of story about a vague mysterious doctor who slipped a few lines to you in-between it all but eventually I just got frustrated and quit. I’m giving this Tier 2 only sparing a lower ranking because it should hopefully become an equally valued continuation of the first two games which were easily Tier 1. As for the beginning though, Requiem is an apt title for this one. A song for the remembrance of the dead may be a bit too accurate if this title doesn’t pull its foot out of the grave.
–You know what, screw it. I know I shouldn’t give into peer pressure, but I just came back from reading some Steam reviews to see if it was just me who thought this one missed the mark. Apparently I’m not, and it doesn’t get any better the more you play it, which is sad. I’m moving this to where it belongs in Tier 3.–
