Penumbra: Overture review (PC)

The world of video games might not have produced as many indie horror classics, but the next best thing might just be Penumbra: Overture -- Episode One. This deeply creepy first-person action adventure from Frictional Games may be so low budget that it first crept out of the grave in 2006 as a free online demo, but it delivers in the shivers department. Although there isn't much here for action-first splatterfest fans, and a few technical glitches make some aspects of the design more frustrating than frightening, a constant sense of peril and isolation mean that you shouldn't play this one unless you're happy to sleep with the lights on for a while.

As with all effective horror, atmosphere is paramount here. Penumbra gets off to a Lovecraftian start with the lead character, Phillip, getting a letter out of the blue from his long-missing father. The old man was apparently declared dead some 30 years before, but that didn't prevent him from licking a stamp and directing his son to a safety deposit box filled with indecipherable notebooks and a map of northern Greenland. All of this is more than a tad surreal. None of the backstory is explained, there is no character development, and you're not even clued in on why Phillip decides to head off to Greenland and wander around by himself in a blizzard. While this style of storytelling won't please fans of rigorous plots, the vagueness gives the game a gauzy, dreamy vibe. All of the action takes place in a mausoleum-like abandoned mine, too, which heightens both the weirdness and the sense of being detached from the real world.

Yet at the same time, this adventure is down to earth in many ways. Interacting with your surroundings is courtesy of a standard point-and-click interface, but you also have the ability to manually manipulate just about every object in the game. Doors, for example, aren't opened simply by clicking on them. Instead, you have to click on them and then pull them open by drawing back the cursor. You can similarly shove, carry, and pull just about every object in the game, from rocks to barrels of TNT. This gives you a tremendous amount of control over the environments and provides the game with organic puzzles. The developers haven't gone too far with this concept, either, so you're not constantly turning wheels or pulling open drawers. There is always a good reason for manipulating objects, and this usually involves solving commonsense conundrums by constructing a ramp over an electric fence with boards, sliding shelves out of the way to reveal a passage, stacking boxes to make a jumping platform, and other tasks that are similarly equal parts brainwork and busywork.

Combat is a bit iffy, though. It works along the same lines as what's described above, which means that you fight by mimicking actual movements like swinging a hammer or a two-by-four. The feel is similar to the mouse-swing mechanic in a golf game. This makes battles more intense than in the usual click-to-kill game, as your occasional bouts with creatures like undead dogs and giant spiders are realistically frantic and desperate. Unfortunately, fights are also so frenetic that it's almost impossible to control your movements. The camera angle locks when you hold down the mouse button and go into attack mode, which is a big headache because the nasties you battle never stay fixed in one spot and can take a lot of punishment before shuffling off this mortal coil. You eventually get used to combat (the trick is to keep hammering enemies when they go down), but it would have been much more sensible for the camera to lock on and move with enemies.