This is one game I had high hopes for and was genuinely excited about the opportunity of a first look courtesy of the preview.
So the preview consisted of the first five locations of the game.
Your character Philip wakes up in a locked dirty room – mattress on the floor etc. you can hear another “prisoner” in pain and know you must escape. The only way out is through the ventilation shaft hidden behind a shelving system.
This will involve moving the shelving system away from the wall and unscrewing the grill of the shaft from the wall. Once inside the ventilation system there is evidence that others have used this route to escape (but from what ?) they have left warning messages , directional arrows for you to follow but they have also left booby traps so you need to watch your step. The ventilation system leads to the messhall ,again you’ll have to overcome some traps before entering the main room. Once inside the messhall you will discover some information as to what is going on before entering the sewer.
Gameplay
Philip is stuck in a pretty bleak environment – the graphics are suitably gritty and the haunting background music and Philip’s breathing , certainly create a creepy atmosphere. The story is solid and looks promising and there is a generous inventory allotment and a paper trail of reference notes (or clues). Against the grey backgrounds however the items available for your inventory such as a shiny coin, torch, batteries and glostick etc. are noticeable and easily to acquire. A fun bit of the game is the ability to pick up items such as milk jugs, tool boxes and throw them against the walls to smash them up . However, and this is where Penumbra Black Plaque falls down badly – the controls are awkward. I found the keyboard to be clumsy and frustrating at times. Often it involved having to position the character correctly before being able to perform an action this meant having to shuffle Philip about to try and trigger the action icon.
A tutorial is provided at the beginning explaining and letting you try the different keys functions – as it turns out there’s 18 (!) of them which I found a bit excessive and detracted from the game itself.
Conclusion
It took a while for me to get used to all the different functions and controls but they remain quite frustrating and did tend to spoil my initial enjoyment of the game however Penumbra’s potential is promising so it is worth sticking at it . I would also say that the sensitivity of your mouse does make quite a big difference in terms of your interaction with the game environment (and I was playing it on a laptop with scroll mouse ). Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed before the full version release but as it stands Penumbra Black Plaque will probably only be appreciated by the die hard adventure gamers. In the meantime I will wait patiently for the full version as this won’t deter me from playing Penumbra Black Plague on release
