Doggies and Spiders and Worms, Oh My!

I finished Penumbra: Overture last night, and the episodic nature of the games became readily apparent when the game ended on a very serious cliff hanger. I decided that instead of providing final thoughts for this and each of the other two episodes, I would wait until I finish all three. In the mean time, I'm going to share some of my experiences with this first episode.

Penumbra does a great job of providing tension in ways I've never seen in a game before. While I feel that the zombie dogs fell short in that regard (more on that in my final thoughts), the spiders in the game were awesome.

In the early stages of the game, I found myself crawling through some webbed tunnels and finding numerous notes left by a previous occupant. They detailed his experiences living with the spiders. While he feared them at first, he eventually started eating them (which eventually poisoned his tongue and he had to cut it out!). He also chronicles how the spiders slowly started getting bigger up until the point they couldn't fit through the cracks in the tunnels. The whole time I was in those tunnels, I was a little on edge, constantly expecting them to jump out at me. When I did experience them, they provided a great little scare.

I had just climbed up into a new tunnel. I started down the cave and saw some HUGE eggs on my left side. The next thing I knew, spiders were pouring out of them and swarming me. After a quick reload, I ran past them into the next chamber, turned and rolled a rock in front of the whole, only to realize I had opened up ANOTHER spider nest. I ran from that chamber and quickly lit some spilled paraffin that was on the ground. I gleefully watched the trailing spiders burn. From there, I moved a boulder out of the way and started down a pretty steep downward incline. The rumbling behind me (gotta love surround sound) signaled the oncoming boulder. I rushed down to the end of the corridor and made a quick right turn... and of course found myself face to face with ANOTHER spider nest. One quick girlish shriek later, I was desperately running in the other direction frantically swinging my pick axe at a cave in trying to get away. It was a superb moment of game play filled with a constant, very palpable tension.

The other creatures I encountered were rock worms. VERY large rock worms.

In my first encounter with them, I had walked into a new area, crossed a wooden bridge and tried to open a door. I had no sooner taken my cursor hand off the door than a large pounding started on the other side. I was close enough to the door that I didn't even see what came through and killed me. I quickly reloaded, repeated the previous steps, and then ran back away from the door. The worm that came through was so massive and nasty looking, I literally just stood there, frozen, as it killed me.

Later on, the game had a great chase moment where you frantically run from another (the same?) worm, hopping over acid pits, bashing through boards, and closing doors behind you... only to find the crank that opens the final door is working WAY too slowly. As I sat there frantically spinning my mouse trying to get that door to open (remember the fun physics system at work here), my heart was practically pounding out of my chest. It took me two more playthroughs in that section to finally calm down enough to realize I could collapse the chamber behind me.

Creepy crawlies aside, the first episode finished pretty strong. There was a great moment of flipping on a light switch (turned out it was a black light and it showed some... hidden... things) and I also discovered the shocking history of my "friend" I had been communicating with via a radio. The final fate of said friend (don't want to ruin anything) was also something absolutely crazy.

I'll leave my final impressions until I finish all three games/episodes, but so far, I am thinking that it was $5 VERY well spent.