Penumbra Overture

I wanted to like Penumbra. Overture has the early versions of many things that made Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Frictional's following games good - the atmosphere, an interesting mystery, scary chase sequences, sound design, physics system, the works. But it has two fatal flaws. Firstly, the story really goes nowhere in terms of the abovementioned mystery because it exists to set up Penumbra: Black Plague. I knew that going into it, so at worst I assumed Black Plague will be good enough to make up for this (it was not but that's a separate review). Secondly, IT'S NOT BLOODY SCARY. It has scary chase sequences, yes, and I liked them, but those were the only scary parts. Partially because the two non-scripted enemy types in the game are just not frightening. Between their AI not being particularly smart and their animations being stiff they just aren't threatening. But the main problem which ruins the threat and therefore scariness of the enemies is the COMBAT SYSTEM. Now, the melee combat is beyond clunky, so it doesn't really make the enemies not scary. What does is (spoiler-text'd to preserve potential enjoyment of ppl who haven't played yet) [spoiler]that the combat also works thru Frictional's physics system. Pick up ANY rock or larger object and you can stun-lock any enemy in the game until they die, they ragdoll and you can stand over them ready to bash them back down as soon as they get back up.[/spoiler] This makes hiding from them feel tedious rather than scary. Sure, I could choose to avoid the obviously easier and faster solution to the problem of a patrolling monster in favour of hiding to "preserve the dread", but then my immersion is completely gone. I'm no longer Philip Buchanon, sneaking thru an abandonded mine with a bunch of mutated animals. I'm a guy in front of a computer consciously making the game harder for myself by sitting in a corner doing nothing, waiting for the dog enemy to fack off somewhere else. The other half of the game, the puzzles, isn't exactly bad, but it also isn't anything to write home about. Besides the obvious physics puzzles like "remove rocks from a crate so you can move it out of the way" it feels like a point-and-click adventure at times but in 3D and with (thankfully) no moon logic. Lastly, a technical problem. If you have multiple monitors the game locks to 1.0 gamma no matter what you set in the settings, which further detracts from the scariness bcs it's too damn bright. The fix is to download a fan-made patch and run the game thru a BAT file provided in it (it works for all 2,5 Penumbra games despite being made for Overture, you just need to change the EXE name in the BAT file with Notepad++ or a similar program). This nukes Steam overlay integration, and in order to lauch the game via the BAT thru Steam you need to add a command in the game's properties window. The silver lining is there's no other stuff like achievements or cloud saves it could break. All in all, I love needing to download community patches to preserve an essential element of a non-abandonware horror game. I would reccomend Penumbra: Overture (and the Penumbra series in general but that's smth to get into under Black Plague and Requiem) on a sale if you have an archeological bent and want to find out where Frictional Games started. Otherwise, just stick to their output from 2010 onwards.