Penumbra Trilogy Review

Survival Horror fans: If you’re not too busy, I’d like a minute of your time. I know you’re not really doing anything, because the number of quality releases in the genre over the past few years can be counted with a preschool education.

Though it’s already been there several times in the past, Survival Horror has gone to Hell. Newer titles smother you with health and ammunition. And no matter how revolting, faith-crushing, or vile the Lovecraftian monstrosity back to swallow the world/animated legion of festering corpses/ruinous proof man should never play God regardless of how cool it makes him feel that’s creeping ever closer to you is, your dozens of high caliber firearms assure the abomination will never be referred to as “scary.”

Fortunately, the twisted minds over at Frictional Games are bringing Survival Horror back in a big way. The studio’s recent Penumbra trilogy has all the right elements: an underarmed protagonist, truly vicious enemies, and a story worth reading a bunch of dead people’s journals to unravel.

Players immerse themselves in Penumbra’s chilling world through a plucky, inquisitive physicist named Phillip. After his dear old mum kicks the bucket, Phil receives a letter from his father, Howard, a man supposedly deceased. The message is full of cryptic directions to somewhere in Greenland, as well as a plea to destroy all evidence leading to it. Instead, Phillip decides to journey to the ends of the earth to determine what exactly mortified his dad.

The biggest draw of Penumbra, aside from its creepy, subterranean locales, is the real-world physics engine players use to solve puzzles. While exploring a vacant mineshaft whose tunnels house a highly advanced research facility, players can mess with the world around them in a simple, logical fashion.

Initially, there’s a slight disconnect between the action you want to perform — e.g. twisting open a hatch so you don’t freeze to death at the game’s onset — and the finicky series of swipes and clicks it takes to accomplish it. Getting Phil to take direction requires a bit of practice. But once you reach that blissful peak of absolute control, Penumbra’s puzzles feel less like arbitrary impediments and more like feasible problems with intuitive solutions.

Want to open that drawer? Click on the handle and move the mouse toward you. Can’t quite reach something on the top shelf? Grab a chair and hop on up. Something from your most terrifying nightmares pursing you with the ferocity of a starving hound on an all-fox diet? Block the door. And pray. (I’m pretty sure that command is mapped to Ctrl + P, but I can’t really recall.)

Of course, enemies don’t just call it a day when they run into a makeshift barricade. Crates, plywood, the doors themselves… enemies can bust through anything with enough effort and nothing better to do. And when they do tear down your walls (physically and emotionally), you have little recourse except for booking it.

In order for a game’s ghastly creatures to actually scare you, you have to feel powerless. Penumbra makes you feel like the justice system’s efforts to incarcerate the upper class. Early on, you can kill enemies with your pickax — the only thing resembling a weapon in the entire game — but once you’re forcibly disarmed halfway through the story, you’re out of luck. Even when you’re fortunate enough to have that blunt swingin’ instrument, though, taking down multiple foes is next to impossible.

During the game’s 10 hour run, you’ll never once stumble across a firearm. This makes sense, because I’m pretty sure men and women of science don’t make a habit of packing magnums. Occasionally, the game lets you spring traps on the baddies, but these set pieces are in short supply.

Most of the game isn’t about combat, though. If you crouch and stick to the shadows, Phillip channels Sam Fisher and fades into the backdrop. Of course, the similarities between Penumbra’s fatalistic hero and the most lethal human being ever employed by the U.S. government end with a love of sneakin’.

See, Phil’s courage falls somewhere between your neighbor’s annoying, yippy chihuahua that just won’t shut the fuck up and a smelly, social outcast dreaming about asking the cheerleading captain to prom. If our underground explorer stares at an enemy for too long, he’ll lose his cool and start screaming, which sort of gives away his hiding position.

But, I’ve spent too much time talking about the game’s sinister rouge gallery. Players will face down more puzzles than monstrosities throughout Phil’s stay beneath scenic Greenland. These obstacles of the mind are nothing short of brilliant.

It happens in every Survival Horror game: A fuse blows (because, I mean you can’t really expect anyone on a facility’s staff to maintain infrastructure if they’re all dead) and it’s up to the player to find a replacement. Penumbra makes players go through these motions as well.

However, the second time you encounter a fuse box, it’s inside of a locked-down containment chamber, and the hulking steel door sealing you in isn’t budging without a little jolt of Edison’s medicine. Whenever you flick the door switch, you’re greeted with a shower of sparks.

At first, I was infinitely pissed. I believe my exact words were, “Seriously? Another goddamn fuse puzzle?” But it became rapidly apparent there weren’t any spare parts to be had in my metallic prison. All I could find were a few barrels of oil and a staff memo stating the doors would open in the event of an emergency.

I’m sure conniving minds out there have already figured out you need to drag the barrel in front of the fuse box, flick the switch, and let the ensuing flames herald in fire alarms.

Another puzzle tasks players with building an explosive concoction, which requires them to consult several collected documents and actually think about what they’ve read. Then, they have to ferry the liquid explosive to a cave-in without blowing themselves up in the process. Naturally, the journey is full of jumps and drops.

Penumbra isn’t really a platformer, and for the most part, it doesn’t try to be. However, during the sequence above and a frantic chase scene starring you and a gargantuan, burrowing lamprey, Penumbra’s glow fades ever so slightly. The controls are normally a bit touchy while remaining mostly manageable, but throw in a time limit imposed by an outside threat and any minor clunkiness is magnified tenfold. The game’s platforming stretches aren’t unplayable, just incredibly frustrating.

Speaking of giant worms… Players will be seeing a lot of them, along with a nefarious menagerie of dogs, spiders, and zombies with flashlights. There aren’t any other humans around, save for corpses, radio chatter, and voices in your head. All the same, the few people you have contact with throughout the game (a former miner in the throes of cabin fever and a savvy female scientist) are surprisingly well developed for how little you actually see them.

The story matches the characters, boasting a top-notch narrative and a tendency to wax philosophical (anything that calls human existence banal gets brownie points in my book). The ending to the first episode is anti-climactic at best, and the third episode is devoid of plot advancement all together. Still, the tale told in episode two makes up for everything.

Also, while not a major complaint, the game’s tutorial is an absolute mess. It glitched up on me three times in a row, before graciously letting me proceed. You can skip it altogether, but the information contained therein makes navigating Penumbra loads easier.

Penumbra brings back everything good about Survival Horror and Adventure games at a time when the first genre is dying and the second is already a corpse with an occasional, involuntary muscle spasm. The game rewards scheming and advance planning over the more conventional “make ‘em all dead” approach the big studios cling to like gospel.

At the risk of sounding pretentious (which with me is like saying there’s a chance reading the Nation/World section of a newspaper could depress you a tad), Penumbra is a thinking man’s — or lady’s — Survival Horror Game.