(Continued from my review of Overture)
Black Plague’s story picks up immediately from where Overture’s left off, but surprisingly, that’s just about the only thing that carries over. There aren’t any more wolves to bash, and in fact, there are no enemies to fight at all, combat has been replaced with a total focus on stealth and frantic escape from enemies. The puzzles are more involved than ever, and if you had gotten used to Overture’s blatant problem spaces, it’s easy to get stuck on the new puzzles that are elegantly built into the environment. The story is better, the locations are better, this game is an upgrade to Overture in almost every possible way. The notable exception is how this is the first time Frictional Games would experiment with a character who constantly chats with the protagonist, but it wasn’t particularly effective. Done well, you get memorable characters like System Shock’s SHODAN, but Black Plague’s narrator character sounds like a poor interpretation of Mark Hamill’s Joker, and disrupts the lonely atmosphere rather than adding to it. However, other than that one little problem, this game really is fantastic. Again, it’s not as polished as Amnesia, but all the same good ideas are here, and a few of the bad ideas are notably absent. So, the question is if I think Black Plague is good enough to be worth playing Overture for, and to that I would definitely say yes, at least for the people interested in this style of horror already. It’s a great ending to the story that Overture set up, and I was pleased with how all the details came together in the end. However, didn’t I say this was intended to be a trilogy? Well, let’s get into that in the review of the final entry of the series, the expansion pack called Requiem.