Penumbra Overture Hands-On Preview

Penumbra Overture is the first part of a horror trilogy developed by Frictional Games. Emerging from the success of one of its tech demos, the game is currently being developed by a skeleton team of four people at Frictional's Swedish headquarters. Set to run for about eight hours, Overture is the first chapter of the series and is set for release in March 2007. The story follows a man called Philip who receives a letter from his dead father and travels to Greenland to investigate. The developers are remaining pretty tight-lipped about the details of what happens next, but a recent preview allowed us to see about halfway into the game and soak up a couple of hours of this action/horror hybrid.

The preview starts with you waking up in a dimly lit room aboard a ship. It serves as a quick introduction to the inventory system because you must explore the room and collect the essential tools and information that you'll need. The world of Penumbra Overture is characterised by menacing shadows, so the key item is a torch with plenty of batteries and some glowsticks just in case. This gameplay mechanic may have been used in games from Luigi's Mansion to Condemned, but the fear of the unknown still lends Penumbra Overture a menacing air. Because enemies have difficulty seeing you in the shadows, it's advantageous to stay hidden among them and use your torch sparingly.

Penumbra Overture is similar in theme to Sega's aforementioned Condemned, which was released as an Xbox 360 launch game in 2005. Like Condemned, Penumbra Overture has an oppressive atmosphere, relentlessly dark visuals, and an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat. However, it also brings its own ideas to the table, particularly in regard to the combat controls. Weapons such as spades and pickaxes can be swung using a gesture-based control method via the mouse. Basically, you hold the left mouse button and swing left or right for a hack and forward for a prod. It can be slightly cumbersome at first because you have to make sure you're looking directly at the enemy before you attack, but it's more satisfying to connect this way than simply clicking a button.

Interacting with the world of Penumbra is an important part of the experience. For example, the ability to move and combine items is heavily tied in with the gesture-control system. The Newton Game Dynamics physics engine lets you do pointless things, such as pick up bottles of whiskey and swing lights around. But it also lets you physically close doors by gesturing with the mouse to lock enemies out of rooms. It's heavily tied in to the game's many puzzles, the first of which requires you to drop a box from a large height in order to break it. Later on in the demo, you have to rebuild a ladder by physically lifting the broken shards and hooking them onto the wall to climb up the ladder. The excellent physics engine and gestured mouse interface combine to make the world of Penumbra a tangible place.

Combat plays a small part in Penumbra; the main focus is on exploring and solving puzzles. Most of the puzzles follow the same formula as those found in traditional adventure games, such as finding fuses to fix broken generators and deciphering Morse code to gain access codes. In turn, this means that the levels aren't particularly large or sprawling. The puzzles also flow in a logical order so that you're not backtracking and juggling multiple tasks at once. The majority of clues are delivered by nearby manuals and diaries, with information recorded in your personal diary for future reference. It's a fairly elegant system, and even if we fumbled over a couple of puzzles, they were always well designed.

Like many other recent first-person titles, Penumbra does away with a heads-up display. However, there are visual clues given for certain situations; if you stay in the dark, the screen will go blue to indicate that you're hidden and out of sight from the enemies. The inventory also seems fairly well designed; if you press tab, a screen full of items will come up. If you double-click to equip items or grab them and drag them over objects, you can use them in the world.

Built on a proprietary graphics engine, Penumbra Overture isn't at the forefront of PC visuals, but its world is a pleasant enough place to explore. The demo did not show any outdoor locations and instead concentrated on indoor locations, such as caves and the inside of a ship. Certainly, the game still needs work in some areas, such as enemy models, with the wolves in particular moving unnaturally and looking unthreatening. However, the team recognises that some of these models are incomplete in this version and says that they will be finished in time for release. Generally, the game is well presented, with accomplished ambient lighting effects and a particularly good soundtrack.

Penumbra Overture certainly shows a lot of promise at this stage, with the small unproven team at Frictional managing to create an enticingly eerie horror game. While our preview didn't allow us to see how the story pans out or much variation in environments, there's no doubt that the game has some interesting puzzles. Combined with an oppressive atmosphere and a high level of interactivity, this makes for a gameworld that we look forward to getting immersed in more. Each chapter is set to last about eight hours, with simultaneous PC, Mac, and Linux versions planned. The first chapter is set for release at a budget price on March 30 in the UK, with two further chapters following later in the year.