Penumbra - First Play - At the “small shaft”

In the beginning, Philip’s mother dies. He tells me, by talking to himself, that he doesn’t have much to live for. It seems natural that he should end up in abandoned mining corridors in Greenland soil. It’s a logical step from his vague expository emotional isolation to this very palpable physical isolation. And the trick works: Penumbra is a game in which I spent a lot of time alone and staring into darkness.

And out of these periods of sensory and emotional deprivation, I made something happen from seemingly nothing time and again. The environments in Penumbra are unsettling, nearly empty places. And it is almost always dark. My flashlight and glow stick have generous but finite charges. There are a few shelves, maybe there’s an empty desk, and amid the clutter of nothing is an item that may interlock with another to open the next door. The sparse decorum helps Penumbra to make a lot of sense in the details, which not every adventure of its ilk is so good at. Items are seemingly where they would be in real life, and if they aren’t, somebody left a diary behind to explain the aberration. Furthermore, the game is physics based. And it opens your mind to all the sort of simple solutions that usually just don’t work in most video games. (Spoiler?) After a few attempts to open a crate, I lunged it down a pit almost out of frustration. Yessir, the speed it picked up on the way down was enough to crack the case. Thanks, Newton. Thanks, Penumbra.

It’s sort of funny that the game seems so rewarding when it’s most frustrating. Some might even lodge accusations that Penumbra is broken. For example, one time I was running from some spiders, and i guess I chose the wrong corridor at the wrong time for my escape. The game auto-saved me in this dead end, and so when I next loaded the game, I heard two screeches, two wails of pain and then I saw the death screen. But the punches it pulls are no more unfair than anything you’d find in lesser Resident Evils. I loaded an earlier save (which is a bit further back than I would have liked due to the game’s console-inspired save system) and started again with the knowledge I didn’t have the first time. And it was, when finally I fell practically face first out of the spiders’ den, a thoroughly exhausting and surprising experience.

Penumbra tells you pretty early on that you’re a thinker, not a fighter. Phillip’s attacks are melee because his only weapons are whatever tools he finds in the mineshafts. So while I was looking for clues with one hand, I usually had a pickaxe in the other. When it finally comes to combat, and I’m talking a strict last-case scenario in which I’ve run out of room to run, the six or so awkward, brutal thuds it requires to take down a demonic dog are bittersweet. You have to hold down the mouse button, sweep the mouse horizontally along your desk, let go of the button and repeat. It’s utterly broken and completely savage. The stutters and outright misses come really close to emulating how effective the common man might be at killing an attacking beast with a blunt piece of metal. I’ve survived a very small fraction of battle attempts, and I was always pushed into these failures because of my own hubris or laziness. Pretty much everything can be done without violence.

The mineshaft setting allows the game to strip itself down to the bare essentials of what ends up mostly being a point-and-click adventure (in 3d!) and add elements as necessary. And that’s really satisfying to watch unfold as you play. But I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed when each successive area was another dank cave corridor. Here’s hoping the world may open up a bit in the coming hours or later in the (planned) trilogy.

The first couple of hours of Penumbra are a model of economic game design that rewards players who recognize the simple solutions. The sleek pacing and logical puzzles made it a pleasure to play. And the surprises it offered made it necessary to come back to. It’s a game for the persistent and mature. But it’s also a lot more fun than other games demanding those sort of minimum personality requirements — even when you’re just staring into the dark.

 I played Penumbra with Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 dual-core (1.80GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 Cache), 2 gig of DDR2 RAM, and a GeForce 7600GS.