Penumbra: Requiem

I greatly enjoyed Penumbra: Overture, which I obtained through the first Humble Indie Bundle. Recently I got Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition (which includes Penumbra: Requiem) through a Steam sale and was excited to continue the adventure. While Black Plague was an excellent addition to the Penumbra series, Requiem was unfortunately a very different game. It still fits in as a Penumbra game, but a lot of the things I really love about the series are missing here.

Requiem is the only Penumbra game in which you never encounter another living thing. You do hear from a couple people, but the lack of anyone who could react to you running down a corridor seriously detracts from the feeling of imminent danger. In the first two games I only used the run key if something had noticed me and I was trying to escape it, but in Requiem I used it almost all the time, rambunctiously charging into new rooms knowing there would be no consequence for my overly-forward approach this time around. Instead of waiting for an infected Tuurngait to pass by hoping it won’t notice you before you could advance, you just wait for a piston move out of the way.

The only thing remotely eerie about this game is it’s still mostly dark. Oh but this time around your flashlight doesn’t need batteries, so you can just have it on the entire game if you want — no need to fall back on the spookier illumination of the glow stick because you ran out of batteries. There are also dangerous machines that could crush or grind you, but as you’d expect from a machine they move predictably and are very easy to pass by without harm if you’re paying any attention at all.

Requiem’s gameplay is actually more similar to Portal than the rest of the Penumbra series. Instead of being a psychological horror puzzle exploration game you now have a chamber-oriented puzzle platformer. Remember Portal’s test chambers with a public address voice commenting on your progress? Requiem very much reminded me of that with its series of completely separate chambers where you need to collect certain items and then go to the exit. The items are strange glowing orbs and the exits are some sort of circular teleport gate somewhat reminiscent of Stargate. The game never bothers to explain what those things are or how they fit into the Penumbra universe. My best guess was that they’re some other form of alien tech that the Archaic brought in for their own use. Eventually you encounter a quasi-electrical, inexplicably heavy ball with the TRON logo on it.

Still, Requiem does serve up some well-designed environments. It’s just that after playing Overture and Black Plague I expected them to be as freaky and hostile as those games were. And they are . . . a little . . . but it’s more as a side effect of being set in the Shelter and mines than on purpose to set up the kind of atmosphere the first two games had. The puzzles and platforming are pretty good too — I think the only thing I had to look up was to find out that the levers I assembled could be pushed as well as pulled for a different behavior. Not to say they’re easy puzzles; there’s just enough around the environment that you can figure out what you need to do. Solving the puzzles felt good, and if I had been expecting a puzzle platformer I would have been pleased with Requiem. What it focuses on, it does well. I did like the puzzles in the series, but that’s not what made it Penumbra and Requiem is missing those parts.

I felt that the ending of Black Plague was a suitable ending to the series, so I wasn’t sure what was left to explain in Requiem. I assumed it would be what happens to Philip after sending the message to kill all the Tuurngait until he dies (as his message suggested would happen to him) or escapes. While I have to admit it did do that, it did so in a largely incoherent way. Maybe this was on purpose because Philip’s mind was going and / or the Tuurngait were messing with him because it knew he had betrayed them, but it ended up getting in the way of me actually getting any sort of story out of Requiem. Then the ending seemed to indicate the whole thing (well the Requiem part) was in Philip’s head and he had never left the room he had sent the e-mail from, which is basically the “...and then he woke up” explanation for the weird stuff that happened. I’m cool with small portions of games going that way, like the part early in Black Plague, but to use that on the whole game felt cheap.

Overall, if you’re interested in solving some well-designed puzzles and hearing some names from the first two Penumbra games again then you’re likely to enjoy Requiem. If you’re expecting more Penumbra like I was, you’re likely to be too disappointed in all the cool Penumbra stuff that’s missing to enjoy Requiem for what it does have. It is actually good at what it does, but I ended up mostly focused on what I expected it to do that it didn’t.