Indie Horror: Penumbra Series

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2014

For the month of October, I’m sharing some horror-themed indie games. They may not all be very scary, but if you are looking for some good games to get you in the mood for Halloween, or just want to know what games might give you the chills, this is the place to be. I’m not offering reviews or recommendations – just showing off some of the fascinating breadth of games available from fellow indie developers. Some are excellent classics, some are just interesting recent experiments, but all have roots in horror or the supernatural. If you follow indie games, I’m sure several of these will be familiar to you, but I hope I’ll have managed to pick out a few that you’ve never heard of.

For the first pick of the month, I’m going to go back a little ways to pull up a game series that won’t tax even a somewhat aging system too much. They set the standard for indie first-person horror games. No, I’m not talking Amnesia, although if you guessed that, you’d be close. I’m talking about Amnesia‘s direct predecessors by the same developer: The Penumbra series, by Frictional Games.

Penumbra is a 3D, real-time, first-person perspective adventure game series of horror and isolation. The first game begins with your character, a physicist names Phillip, pursuing the notes of his long-lost father. His search takes him to northern Greenland, a wasteland of ice and snow, where he discovers an abandoned mine that – he eventually learns – was a lot more than just a mine. Combining the psychological horror of being completely alone and trapped in a frozen wilderness, and the threat of predators – four-legged, eight-legged, two-legged, and no-legged – that inhabit the underground complex, and it’s an intense situation.

Add to this the tendency for your character to panic. As stress builds, the visuals begin to swim, and eventually Phillip will panic – an almost certainly deadly situation. In a particularly clever twist (in my view), getting a good look at something terrifying will cause Phillip’s panic level. And he can’t fight very well – a situation made worse by an unintentionally clumsy combat interface in the first game (which caused the developers to just bag fighting altogether by the second game). Your best bet, when facing threats, is to flee or hide. Hide… and do not look too carefully at whatever is searching for you.

Most of the gameplay emphasizes problem-solving, puzzles, and exploration – good old adventure-game fare, in spite of a fully 3D environment. But with its inclusion of stealth-based mechanics, believable AI, good storytelling, and genuinely creepy effects in a stark, oppressive setting, they are truly noteworthy and pioneering games of terror… They not only set the stage for their own immediate successor in first-person horror, but for many others.

 

Filed Under: Indie Horror Games - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



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