Subject: Penumbra Trilogy Sun Jun 20, 2010 1:38 pm
Anyone here played the Penumbra series by Frictional Games? Horror and puzzle solving while hiding from nasty things that want to kill you, it's a few of the few truly scary games I have ever played. It's available on PC, Mac, and Linux and is dirt cheap, so there's no reason to get it if you even mildly enjoy horror.
The games consist of Penumbra Overture (which recently was in the Humble Indie Bundle), Penumbra Black Plague, and Penumbra Requiem. The first game is monumentally creepy and its only flaw is a last-resort combat system that you never have to use anyway. The second game fixes that problem by removing combat altogether, and is also exponentially scarier than the first. It's considered their best game so far. Requiem was a bit of a departure, being solely a puzzle game with few horror elements and no actual danger of dying. It wasn't regarded as highly as the first two but is worth checking out if you like puzzles.
A unique part of all the games is the physics system. Doors, drawers, etc are all opened by holding the mouse and pulling them open and closed, as shown in this video: