This game's atmosphere was so sad and melancholic for me.

Its soundtrack combined with the old mines somewhere underground in uninhabited northern Greenland made for an immersive sensory experience. The abandoned rusty machinery environments had their distinct visual appeal and identity and also this mysterious and haunting aura to them I really liked, as if it was all happening inside a hazy old miner's dream.

The majority of puzzles were a lot of fun to solve and were the most rewarding part of the game.
It wasn't really scary though, as the dogs were so easy to bonk with the pickaxe it lifted most if not all tension.

I had the bug about the plug not giving power in the bulldozer room and had to edit a save file in order to be able to progress. That's very bad, as it seems to be a very common problem. There were lots of shadow, lighting and reflection glitches when you shone the flashlight or glow stick over close objects which was jarring. And, sometimes ambient sounds would transition too quickly and it sounded choppy when you walked from room to room.

I was very disappointed with the ending. It felt as if we didn't really get any answers and that I had just played a series of puzzles more or less unrelated to the main plot of finding out about your dead father, which actually seemed to start moving forward in the second game given the "To be continued". However, I had a good time with it overall.

Let's see if the sequel improves on things.

The atmosphere was palpable and terrifyingly isolating, the sound mixing really getting me in the mood. However the terrible stealth design where, at least in one area, there were two enemies with a patrol pattern that had basically no gap and required a hail mary to get past, then the bit with the spiders in the cave that basically turns into trial and error as you are forced to blindly wander through some caves trying to find where to go while chased by more spiders than you can take on, I decided to kick in the head at that point, disappointed but enjoyed some of what little I did play.

Bought the Penumbra collection on a whim considering how dirt cheap it was to relive some nostalgia and It’s still just how I remembered it. It’s really janky like a lot of Frictional games but I think it sorta adds to the experience in some way, like how you can just cheese dogs by running and jumping or how some physics objects just fly all over the place if you grab them weirdly. In terms of story it’s fine and works for what it is but I have always found the gameplay to be the main meat and potatoes of this game. The puzzles are fun and the enemies (minus the spiders) are fun to sneak around or completely cheese in some scenarios. Overall, it’s a really solid game and for how cheap it is during sales it’s worth a playthrough.

As a precursor to the Amnesia series, Penumbra Overture begins the episodic, quasi-Lovecraftian trilogy of one man's descent into an abandoned Greenland lead mine, and while its use of combat and occasionally clumsy physics are cumbersome (though certainly influential to the former's return in Amnesia: The Bunker), Frictional Games succeeds as usual at instilling an atmosphere of terror around sparse use of monsters and frequent use of tense aural creepiness and the dreaded visual horror of what lurks in shadows, locked rooms, and deep holes. Phillip's story is the typical (if too dependent on unnarrated text) discovery of a clandestine organization, alien artifacts, existential crises, and the insanity of being alone for far too long, but the implications of these elements over an explicit, expository nature (which Black Plague will develop) gives significance to the player's ignorance where the sequels cannot sustain it, merely fill it with ambiguities. Of the three games, Overture is my favorite due to the overall creepiness of the mines and the trajectory of a character named Red, whose fate is a necessary evil in this dismal world. Overture is not Amnesia, yet its puzzles, atmosphere, and narrative provide more than enough to predict their iterative continuation in that future series.

stop, worst combat i've seen?
6,0/10 - Length
5,0/10 - Enjoyment
6,0/10 - Perfomance/Bugs
6,0/10 - Story/Experience
4,0/10 - Gameplay

Score = 5,4/10

This is kinda exactly what you'd expect for the first entry in "the series that came before Amnesia". Penumbra Overture is stylistically very similar to its more famous younger cousin; the story and characters are verbose and melodramatic, the setting is gloomy, bleak and in places coldly mechanical, and it all leads to an honestly pretty great atmosphere; decent sound design and a conscious focus on lighting help in that regards as well.

But in terms of execution, Penumbra: O feels... sloppy. The UI is actually just horrible in this game, not so much the menus but how you actually use items. To swing a pickaxe, for example, you equip it from the inventory (or the hotbar the game never tells you exists), then hold left click to enter 'interaction mode'. Then you can swipe the mouse to the left then to the right to perform a rightward swing (or vice versa), or pull it towards you then push it forwards to perform a bash. I get that combat shouldn't really be a viable option in these kinds of games, but this control scheme also applies when, say, bashing down a barrier or mining through some dirt. And also most of the enemies in this game are... very poorly programmed, uninspired in design and frankly more irritating than scary, and so the temptation to fight through the UI and whack 'em to death with my tools became very strong indeed...

P:O also has a habit of giving you vague clues of what you're supposed to do but straight up not giving enough information. An example of this was partway through when I was going through a pretty maze-like cavern and came across a boulder, and my character said something like "quickly, I need to use this to block off that tunnel!". To which my response was: "Which tunnel mate, this is a 4-way intersection". And yeah, it took me 4 guesses to block the correct tunnel. On the whole, though, I think the puzzles might actually be a bit less obnoxious than in Amnesia? I remember Amnesia having some pretty ridiculous puzzles towards the end, but nothing in P:O felt unreasonable in that sense.

But yeah, overall I would say this is just a more primitive and underdevloped Amnesia. It's not bad overall, but it's just... fine. If you've played through the Amnesia series and are desperate for more of the same then this will do in a pinch, but otherwise just go play the Dark Descent it's so much better.

So… The reason I don’t recommend this game is because I simply found out that games like this are not my type of game. But I did end up buying all of this trilogy in a bundle for cheap. Along with the current Amnesia games and SOMA. The Penumbra trilogy is the first games made by Fractional Games, and being an indie game, its… ok. But it’s just that, ok. But given the year this game was made, 2007, it seems a bit lacklustre. Though games from that year I have played with are games that are triple A, so that is an unfair comparison… However, another reason I didn’t enjoy this game too much is because of the weapon mechanics and moving the mouse. It seemed completely unresponsive sometimes, and then at one point I was stuck in a death loop where the save point is and I wasn’t too sure how to go back to a previous save, luckily it is possible.

Overall, I think my review is meant to people like me, who like more straightforward games, and easier to solve puzzles… then again, I might just be stupid. I'm probably stupid. I’m sure its not too much of a bad game for people who like this genre.

I will be playing the 2 others in the trilogy at some point though, because I did spend money on them, along with the Amnesia game and SOMA too.

With Penumbra serving as kind of a blueprint of the early 2010s horror smash hit Amnesia (which I personally have mixed but overall positive feelings on), there are things I like more about Penumbra and there’s things I’m glad were left in the wastebasket. But it still comes together to make a pretty passable horror ride.

The storytelling in both of these games is nothing incredible but I much prefer how everything builds up here, reading through notes and journals that give context to the events that led to the mines’ derelict state. Although I do think the protagonist’s journey does get kind of muddy and lost as you progress, even though Red, whose peril derails your main objective, is a pretty memorable character. Also, I think that hiding vital notes that are important to progression within notes that are completely lore related and supplementary, is kind of stupid. Also in atmosphere I think that P:O just barely feels better, even when The Dark Descent’s Victorian occult alt-history oozes so much for me to chew on, the location of Penumbra feels so much more unique, and unmistakably, immutably cold.

The game also has some real issues with balancing items. The glowstick is completely overpowered, the description labels it a “ghoulish” last substitute that’s essentially better than nothing if you run out of flashlight battery, but the truth is that it’s completely superior since it never runs out of charge and it lights up your entire surroundings in about a couple meters’ radius, albeit in a sickly teal, but it’s still far outweighs anything depletable.

In concept, combat has some cool ideas, where you manually have to wind up an attack on an enemy in the classic Frictional fashion of their games feeling to that level of “manual”, but in practice it can get really, really bad. Specifically on the spider enemies, whose hitboxes feel only measurable by nanometers, trying to properly wind up attacks against them while they chip away at your health bouncing around the place is an incredible pain in the ass. Combat can also be super exploitable, “stealth” sections with the undead dogs are completely trivialized by positioning yourself out of their reach and battering them.

The puzzles in the game are anywhere from fine and inoffensive to pretty stupid and unintuitive. The worst I can think of is when you come to a part where the code to unlock a door is apparently hidden among mad scribings across a wall. Can you, the player, see this code? No. I stared at the wall for what I knew was way too long, when the answer was that you had to find a hidden blank piece of paper, which was 2 load zones away, and then come back and use it on the wall to get the code, which you, the player, still cannot see on the wall. Unbelievably stupid, and to think I saw people praising these puzzles as if this is some “thinking man’s game”.

It’s weird for me to say that I prefer Amnesia to this game when I still don’t find TDD anything to write home about, but this was a necessary stepping stone for them to understand how to proceed with their horror output.

A good horror adventure game but only part 1 of a 3 part story. What Overture sets up is interesting and I look forward to Black Plague and Requiem.
Fairly simple horror game, most of the horror comes from the atmosphere and a few chase sequences. The adventuring part is pretty good too for all the revelations and puzzles to expose as you make your way through the mine shaft. I think the combat and enemy encounters are lackluster, most of them occur in crawlspaces and the maze-like hallways.
It works with what they could do in 2007 and only a few short years later Frictional would develop Amnesia: The Dark Descent, one of the best horror games ever made. I definitely recommend this game and everything else in the Frictional bundle.

Environments are very repetitive, there is literally no variety to enemies and the combat system takes away all the tension devs worked HARD to create with impeccable sound design and story that ramps up as you go through it. When you are done with the game you feel like you have beaten a prologue to a way more interesting story ahead, and it's 100% the truth! I cannot imagine how fucking mad people back in the day had to have gotten when they found out that this $20 game that lasts between 3 and 4 hours is just a first half of a story that continues in Black Plague. The 3,5/5 rating is ONLY if you plan to play the sequel right after this one, otherwise, it would be like a 2/5.