The two Penumbra games are more interesting curios than they are good games. What you'll find within Overture and Black Plague is a peek into the early days of one of the most important horror game developers of the last two decades, but beyond that it's not very compelling.

Don't get me wrong, on the whole I liked my time with the Penumbra games. They're still genuinely quite creepy and contain and are remarkably well constructed for indie games from 2007. That said though, they are completely eclipsed by Amnesia which came only two years after Black Plague. These really feel like glorified tech demos, proof of concept for the gameplay, story and tone of the Dark Descent, but given how brilliant the first Amnesia is, that's not as much an insult as it at first sounds.

Penumbra Overture in particular is quite creepy. Some of the puzzles are pretty great and the environments are surprisingly varied for a four hour horror game set in a weird mine. The story is surprisingly compelling too, with a brilliantly paced mystery unfolding as you make your way through this freezing hell, accompanied on the radio by a decently written madman who's been trapped a lot longer than you. It all builds to a suitably horrifying conclusion, followed by a cliffhanger that might have been better left unresolved. All that said, Overture still isn't a great game, far from it. The combat is absolutely awful, some sequences demand such immediate reaction time and foreknowledge that I have no idea how you'd complete them without savescumming and it is quite slight in the end.

For all its flaws though, Overture is definitely the better game of the two. If Overture is the first act in the story, then Black Plague feels like the third act from a different game entirely. Rather than a creepy, isolated mine filled with mysterious, mutated animals, we're thrust into repetitive research facility filled with goofy alien zombies. The exposition is turned up to eleven here, and one of the greatest strengths of the prior game - Phillip's ongoing and characterful interjections - are is basically absent here, as the protagonist's observations have been drained of colour. The conclusion just feels like a prototype of Amnesia's twist and while I didn't hate it, it's a sour note to finish the duology on. Thankfully combat is now absent, but the puzzles are definitely less interesting.

Overall, I do still think these games are worth a look. If you're a die hard Frictional fan, then you've probably already played them, but if not, they're always extremely cheap in a sale and you can play through both in an evening.

I'd say this second entry in the series is, overall, a fair bit better than Penumbra: Overture. There were a lot of irritating gameplay decisions in Overture (terrible combat, horrible UI when using tools, improperly contextualised 'hints') which are straight up removed in Black Plague. But it does at times feel like the devs didn't really make any attempt to replace these removals with anything. Long story short, Black Plague is much more of a walking sim than Overture or other games in the genre like Amnesia. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I definitely prefer it this way than to how Overture felt the need to pepper the map with dozens of copy of the same two irritating enemies, but it does hurt the immersion a bit in Black Plague when it isn't very good at hiding just how infrequently you are in danger.

Aesthetically I'd also say Black Plague is an improvement on Requiem. The overall theme is more interesting (to me at least) and much much more varied; gone are the endless carbon copy mineshafts of Requiem, and the different parts of the facility in Black Plague actually feel like distinct and different places. I also found that the part of the Penumbra story told in Black Plague was somewhat more engaging than in Requiem. Requiem seemed to be focused on desperately coming up with reasons that the player character got himself into this mess to begin with (and frankly not coming up with many good reasons at all...), whereas Black Plague is about him trying to get out of it and is inherently more relatable. There are also more characters and generally more moving parts to the story, and one of the plot twists caught me completely off-guard in a good way. I was unsure about Clarence at first (the character you spend the most time interacting with), but I grew to appreciate his presence over time; he can be pretty annoying, but he gives this game a certain life and character that was less present in Requiem.

Black Plague, however, loses some points for me for its ending. It sucks. The last challenges / trials / whatever you want to call them are absolute nonsense, and completely tonally dissonant with the rest of the game. And this extends to the ending of (this part) of the story as well. Everything just becomes a bit farfetched and silly right at the close, and it definitely lost me a bit. But right up until the tonal shift (which is very near the end) I found this to be a pretty good time. It's another 'Amnesia with less stuff in it' game, but with almost all of the actively bad stuff from Overture stripped out, and as a consequence I feel I can recommend this one somewhat more.