Penumbra (video game series)



"My name is Philip. If we are lucky, then by the time you receive this, I will be dead. If fate frowns, we all perish."

- Philip during the opening.

Spanning two games and an expansion pack, Penumbra is a Survival Horror that follows physics professor Philip, who, after attending to his mother's funeral, receives a letter from his long dead father Howard instructing him to destroy a breadcrumb trail of mysterious documents without reading them. Phillip, suffering from severe Genre Blindness, instead follows the trail to a forgotten old mine somewhere in northern Greenland, where he promptly finds himself trapped and (seemingly) alone during a blizzard.

Created by Frictional Games (the company that went on to make the equally terrifying Amnesia the Dark Descent and its up-and-coming sequel A Machine For Pigs) Penumbra is also notable for its unique engine that allows solving puzzles through clicking, dragging, and directly interacting when using items, giving an especially genuine, immersive atmosphere that even earned Black Plague a nomination for best script (from The Writers Guild of Great Britain, that it ultimately lost to Overlord).

"Clarence: "Christ! Go here, go there, fetch this, run me a bath... typical broad, atypical circumstances."
 * Abandoned Mine: Primary setting for the first game.
 * Air Vent Passageway: Used at the beginning of Black Plague.
 * All Just a Dream: The good ending in is an example of this.
 * Either that, or it's the bad ending, as
 * All Myths Are True: There's a grain of truth in all the Inuit legends about the Tuurngait, mysterious spirits roaming the frozen wastes of northern Greenland...as you'll discover with alarming frequency from the occasionally found textbook or old newspaper article. Overlaps quite a bit with Foreshadowing.
 * An Aesop: Arguably an Anvilicious aesop, considering the . Unless you consider the end of Black Plague to be positive. Then it's just a broken one.
 * Ancient Tradition / Ancient Conspiracy:
 * Apocalyptic Log: Over and over - this is a horror game, after all. First with Dr. Roberts' (the spider hater) insane diary, then with Eloff Carpenter (who recorded on cassette his horrifing final moments) and at last,.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: While in the infirmary, you stumble across a note detailing when using the Cryo-stasis chamber is deemed acceptable. The list of permissible ailments include "cardiomyopathy, glaucoma, polio, diabetes, or halitosis."
 * Badass Bookworm: Philip is definitely a Non-Action Guy, but even he has his occasional moments of badassery.
 * Back Tracking: There is some, but fortunately, it doesn't take too long and tries to avoid becoming Filler.
 * Bag of Spilling: Justified both times.
 * Bittersweet Ending: The ending of Black Plague.
 * Black Comedy: Clarence embodies this trope readily.
 * Body Horror: There's a reason why everyone in the has a Cyanide Pill - in case it would come in handy...
 * Book Ends:
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: When the intercom messages in Requiem really get creepy.
 * Chekhov's Gun: Armstrong's Mixture, to some extent in Overture. Shows up as a page in an explosives manual you find very early in the game but isn't actually used until very near the end where you use it to blow your way through to Red.
 * Chunky Salsa Rule
 * Cloudcuckoolander / Talkative Loon: Tom Redwood, a.k.a. "Red". He constantly insults, amuses and helps you in Overture. All at the same time. He's both an unusual guide and a very memorable character, to say the least. When you finally manage to reach him, you have to . After that you finally discover the secrets of Red's past and explore the isolated and squalid living spaces he had to occupy . Cue Tear Jerker. No wonder the poor sap went gradually insane.
 * Subverted terryfyingly with Dr. Richard Eminiss in Black Plague. He first seems to follow these tropes, but quickly turns out to be anything but humorous...
 * Cowardly Lion: If Philip so much as looks at a monster for too long, there'll be a lens flare, and he'll freak out and give away his position. That said, he never gives up, and he thinks and fights his way out of situations that kill everyone around him.)
 * Cult:
 * Die, Chair, Die!: Generally averted. In the first two games, this is to your benefit, since often you'll need that chair to barricade the door against whatever is pounding it down. That said, there are plenty of breakables in the form of ketchup bottles, Scotch bottles, etc.
 * Diegetic Interface: Besides the inventory window (default key TAB) and an optional tiny crosshair, there is basically no HUD at all.
 * Dissonant Serenity: Early on in Overture, you'll find the logs of a man who made a habit of studying and devouring the local spiders. You'll find an equally cheerful log not much later about how he had
 * Door to Before: The chemical labs have an emergency door, which you can open by sabotaging the flow of chemicals in the lab itself, but only after you get past cameras, enemies, and security puzzles. And then there's the matter of going through the hallway the door leads to...
 * Eldritch Abomination:
 * Enemy Within:
 * The Faceless: Every normal human who isn't already dead when you encounter them.
 * Faux Death / Faking the Dead: Gets you into the Archaic's cryogenics facility so you can steal one of the heads and use it to pass a retinal scanner.
 * Fetch Quest: Done throughout (they are Adventure games, after all), and lampshaded in Black Plague.
 * Faux Death / Faking the Dead: Gets you into the Archaic's cryogenics facility so you can steal one of the heads and use it to pass a retinal scanner.
 * Fetch Quest: Done throughout (they are Adventure games, after all), and lampshaded in Black Plague.

Red : "Really, the hunger is becoming... rather uncomfortable here... How far away are you ? You cannnot be far. I am held captive by a wall of stone in the northeast of the mine. As in any drama, there are many roles to be played. You must act the scientist in mixing potions, act the renegade in plots of destruction...""


 * In other words, you need to make an improvised explosive and blast through the cave-in separating you from the part of the mine inhabited by Red.
 * Fighting From the Inside:
 * Find the Cure: Justified for once -
 * First Person Ghost
 * For Science!:
 * Framing Device: The first two games are framed around an email from Philip to an unspecified individual, explaining why he failed to do something that needed to be done, and has to ask another to complete the task. The expansion pack takes place immediately after.
 * Freeware Game: The original tech demo that started it all (it was created for a Swedish game development contest). The whole series is practically a Continuity Reboot and Adaptation Expansion of the tech demo's basic plot.
 * Full-Frontal Assault: The Infected.
 * Giant Spider: In any other game, they'd be Goddamn Bats. In Overture, they're still weaker than everything else you encounter. Thankfully, they're not actually gigantic - just a bit overgrown.
 * Genre Busting: It's an Adventure Survival Horror Stealth Based Game, with all the in-game manipulation controls and motions being based on dynamic real time physics...
 * Grey and Gray Morality: The final choice Philip is presented with in Black Plague. If he had . When he.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy: An Infected isolated  is generally not very bright.
 * Heal Thyself: Painkillers. For that matter, just walking around in circles can bring you from "I can't feel my arms and legs" to "I'm as fit as can be expected" pretty quickly. File it under Acceptable Breaks From Reality, given how fast your HP can go back down.
 * Hell Hound: The first enemy type in Overture. They're rather quick, and their HP is so high some walkthroughs mistake them for Invincible Minor Mooks, but they can't jump too high, and they're easily distracted with a piece of beef jerky.
 * He Who Fights Monsters: One of the interpretations of the ending in Black Plague.
 * Hive Mind:
 * How We Got Here: The intro cutscene of each installment.
 * Humans Are Bastards:
 * Hundred-Percent Completion: In Black Plague, statistics at the end tell you how many artifacts and documents you collected. Requiem just has artifacts, but they actually serve a purpose - collect them all, and you unlock the Golden Ending.
 * I Cannot Self-Terminate:
 * Improvised Weapon: You don't Drop the Hammer, you swing an actual hammer. Later on you find a small pickaxe (or ice-pick), but you're still pretty heavily outclassed. Then along comes the second game, which offers you no straightforward weapons at all. As in Overture, you can still stun enemies by throwing objects at them, but other than that, you can only rely on your own feet and the patient use of stealth this time.
 * Word of God stated that the weapons were removed because they were intended to be used for defense, but turned into a Cherry Tapping tool.
 * One of the puzzles in Black Plague requires you to create a makeshift Aerosol Flamethrower.
 * Individuality Is Illegal: Why the rejects and destroys . He's simply become too unique to reintegrate.
 * Indy Escape: Once with an actual boulder, once with a rockworm.
 * Interface Screw: The mere existence of  is this trope.
 * It Got Worse: In the first game, your only enemies were rabid dogs, large spiders, and the occasional mutant worm. The enemies of the next game... are much worse.
 * Invincible Minor Minion: The Infected are generally this, but contrary to popular belief, enough physics object impacts can actually kill one.
 * Kill'Em All
 * MacGyvering / Mr. Fixit: A lot of the puzzles and threat-elimination are based on this. Some are a little more complicated, but it's pretty much justified, since Philip is a professional physicist.
 * Malevolent Architecture: Why did that electrified cord have to land in that puddle of water? That's just one of the many questions you'll be asking.
 * Why did those damn steam pipes had to be damaged, spraying dangerously hot steam everywhere ?
 * Mind Screw: Requiem in particular.
 * Not to mention


 * Mysterious Antarctica: Not set in Antarctica, but still a great Video Game example of the "arctic wastes horror" genre. The whole series takes place in an unspecified location somewhere in the far north of Greenland. The atmosphere is captured brilliantly - from the very arrival aboard a chartered fishing boat to the discovery of
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: See Player Punch.


 * Nintendo Hard: Combat in Overture. You're fighting mutated versions of local fauna with a plain pickaxe, weak hammer, or even a nearly useless broom - what could you expect?
 * Nothing Is Scarier / Paranoia Fuel: The Kennels in Black Plague. You never see the monster, presumably
 * Notice This : As in Bioshock, you can turn it off for greater immersion.
 * Our Zombies Are Different: The Infected. And not only human ones.
 * Powerful Pick: It takes a little practice to master, but the pickaxe (and the weaker hammer) can become a powerful and invaluable tool and melee weapon, once you get the hang of it.
 * Psychological Horror: The core premise of the games, as highlighted in the Nothing Is Scarier entry. It's all very well executed, often with many subversions of classic horror tropes. It also makes very effective use of various Primal Fears.
 * Puzzle Boss:
 * The rockworms,
 * Ragdoll Physics: Mostly averted, but not completely.
 * Sand Worm: Or more precisely, a "giant gray rockworm". The real Invincible Minor Minion, and it can also kill you in one hit. Fortunately, there are only two or three of them.
 * Save Point: Voluntary savepoints are done in an interesting fasion: They're ancient cylindrical lantern-like artifacts
 * Screw Destiny: One possible way to view the ending of Black Plague is that.
 * Shout-Out / Homage: Lots. For instance, Howard's and Philip's names hint at H.P. Lovecraft himself, and the Archaic's library contains copies of The Necronomicon and De Vermiis Mysteries.
 * Several food cans are labelled Uncle Cthullhu's Squid Soup".
 * The crowbar from Overture, needed for solving a puzzle, was previously owned by some long-dead arctic explorer named Freeman.
 * In Black Plague the Infected have a blood goatee, Black Eyes of Evil (which resemble glasses from far away), and some wield crowbars.
 * The storytelling is heavily inspired by Poe and Lovecraft. Also, the plot and atmosphere is very similar to John W. Campbell's short story Who Goes There, famously adapted to film by John Carpenter as The Thing.
 * The Donkey Kong like area in Requiem, where flaming barrels roll down several vertically adjacent slopes while music that sounds suspiciously familiar.
 * Silent Protagonist: Philip is an interesting subversion, since he narrates the intro cutscenes and you can read his thoughts and ideas about an object or situation in-game after clicking the right mouse button.
 * Spring Loaded Corpse: The second game's final enemy.
 * Stealth Based Game: You can try to fight anything you come across, but considering that you only have a pickaxe, do you want to ? Not to mention that you're utterly weaponless in the two sequels (if you don't count object-throwing).
 * Philip even shows his Genre Savvy side and lampshades the need for stealth in one of the earliest levels of Overture (where things start looking really serious).
 * Subsystem Damage: The most basic sort: when you're injured, you limp.
 * Surreal Horror: The events in the games get gradually more and more bizarre, especially in Black Plague and Requiem.
 * Taking You with Me:
 * Tempting Fate: Traveling on your own and completely alone to the most isolated regions of Greenland in search for answers about your father's mysterious past requires either utter Genre Blindness or "I've got nothing to lose" sentiments.
 * Ten-Second Flashlight: In the first two games. Requiem uses an Infinite Flashlight (if you're hallucinating it all, no need to hallucinate battery charge drain).
 * The Other Darrin: Philip has a vastly different voice actor in the English version of Overture and Black Plague. All the more strange, since the rest of the voice cast remains the same throughout the series.
 * Overture had a tiny, yet effective voice cast of two people. The Overture incarnation of Philip (though uncredited) was voiced by Tom Jubert, the script writer of the series (since Frictional had little budget to create Overture and could afford a larger voice cast only after the game achieved success). Many fans consider Overture's Philip to be the canon version, since he at least sounds like an Englishman in his 20s or 30s, unlike the suddenly North American-accented 40s-sounding Philip from Black Plague.
 * Unobtainium: The Archaic has discovered seventy different kinds.
 * Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
 * Especially bad if you
 * The Virus:
 * Voice with an Internet Connection: Subverted in Overture - Red can only contact you via walkie talkie, has no idea where you are or whether you're still alive, but he's so lonely he keeps talking. Played straight with Amabel Swanson in Black Plague, and sort of bent in Requiem as Red, Dr. Eminiss, and the bland voice on the intercom all counsel and taunt you.
 * Violation of Common Sense: Well, it fits the theme, but one puzzle requires you to . Incidentally, stupidity is not the only option--it's just the only moral one (as well as the only one that allows you to go on with the game).
 * Not to mention another puzzle where you have to inject yourself with an unknown chemical in order to put yourself in a chemically-induced coma so that the door you need to go through will be unlocked. The function of the item is actually explained in a nearby note, but it is entirely possible to miss it and arrive at this result anyway through good old experimentation.
 * When All You Have Is a Hammer
 * When All You Have Is a Hammer