The Stack

The third game of the Penumbra trilogy is actually an expansion pack for the second game. Various blurbs say that it “ties up loose ends” in the first two games, but really, the only loose end is what happens to Shelter (as the secret excavation site is called) after Philip’s messages go out, and it doesn’t even address that. I suppose there are probably players asking “What happened to Philip after the second game? How did he escape?” — to which the only sensible answers are “Exactly what you saw” and “He didn’t”. It’s a horror story. Seekers after forbidden knowledge have to pay a terrible price.

Nonetheless, Penumbra: Requiem follows Philip’s further adventures. Just one problem: none of it is real. I’ll avoid spoilers about the precise sort of unreality it is — certainly there are multiple possibilities within the previous game’s fiction — but the game doesn’t take long to start dropping hints of irrationality underlying the world, like in a Philip K. Dick novel. For example, at one point, the automatic PA-recording voice, previously heard issuing GLaDOS-like cheerful reminders about how all personnel are required to bring their cyanide capsules when on shift and suchlike, addresses Philip by name, and whispers advice clearly meant for you specifically. Later, it addresses you as “Player”. (Add Metal Gear Solid 2 to the list of games Penumbra has reminded me of!) It’s surreal, but it also lowers the stakes somewhat: how can you be worried about the effects of your actions in a world that makes no sense?

But then, the stakes are already low, because there are no monsters at all this time around. That means it can’t really be described as a survival-horror or a stealth game any more. (Crouching in darkness produces the now-familiar hiding-in-shadows screen effects, but there’s no one around to appreciate it.) Since there’s no need for places to hide in or flee through, the hub areas made of networks of corridors have been eliminated too. Instead, what we have left is a series of self-contained puzzle scenarios with no logical connections to each other: each segment ends with Philip going through a teleporter. So, it’s more purely a puzzle game than the previous installments — the only thing that breaks it up is the frequent platforming elements (including, at one point, a Donkey Kong homage).

Oddly enough for an adventure game, it doesn’t use the inventory for anything except your standard tools (flashlight, notebook, pain relievers, etc). There are things you need to carry around, but it’s always done by dragging them from place to place in the scene itself, like in Half-Life 2 and Portal. Those games built puzzles around this interface, but didn’t explore it as much as Requiem does, or show how well it works in an adventure context. I’d say it works pretty well, as long as the puzzles are designed for it. It feels more natural than an inventory menu, more like a unified interface of the sort found in Mystlike games, but provides a greater range of action than a pure Mystlike click-on-stuff interface. One key mechanic to support it is the way that objects that have to be put in a particular place (in a slot, say) are guided to that position automatically when you get them close enough. This provides important feedback, letting the player know that they’ve done something right.

I should talk about the light. All three games give you three ways of lighting up dark places: glowstick, flashlight, and flares. Overture had text suggesting that the flashlight was the best light source, but the ridiculous rate at which it chewed up batteries meant that you’d sometimes have to resort to the never-dying glowstick. I personally found that this was hogwash: the flashlight may have been better for lighting things at a distance, but since you can’t interact with distant things, the glowstick, with its 360-degree illumination, was more practical. Somehow, though, I found myself using the flashlight more in Black Plague. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was changed to illuminate immediate surroundings better, or maybe the levels just had more long, dark corridors. At any rate, the whole idea of conserving your light fits better with the survival-horror stuff than with a pure adventure game, so Requiem dropped it, and gave you a flashlight with infinite charge. I basically never turned it off.

I notice that I’m talking mostly about mechanics this time, whereas my posts about the previous ones are almost entirely about plot. That’s because there really isn’t much plot this time around. I’d guess that the authors were thinking that, because this is just an expansion pack and not a proper sequel, it can’t have any important plot developments. It’s like the Sunday episodes of syndicated comic strips: since not all newspapers have a Sunday edition, nothing can be allowed to happen that affects continuity. The mechanics, though, are top-notch.

The ending of Penumbra: Black Plague, and the events leading up to it, confirm some of the speculation in my last post about the role of the virus in ancient times — at least, if you trust the central virus hive mind, which can’t be completely objective on the matter. (Yes, it’s another story about a misunderstood alien hive mind. The more I play of Penumbra, the more I notice ideas from other games I’ve played recently, including ones written later. It’s as if the attempt at so many formal genres at once has turned it into a kind of cliché nexus.) It claims that it was once benevolent, but has been fighting for its life ever since the Archaic (the secret organization that built the laboratories) decided that it was a disease and had to be cured. Ah, but what about the zombies? Just infected individuals sent out to patrol the outer reaches; their zombie-like behavior is a consequence of being too far separated from the core to participate in the hive intelligence properly.

Clarence, now. He’s a different kettle of fish. “Clarence” is the name that the player character’s infection gives to himself, sardonically choosing it after inspecting your memory of It’s a Wonderful Life. A complaining bully with an Oscar-the-Grouch accent, he’s both individually smart and unambiguously malevolent, even if he does sometimes help you survive. Furthermore, he has an unnerving amount of power over your mind. He can occasionally take control of your senses, make you see things the way he wants you to see them — for example, eliminating doors that he doesn’t want you to go through, giving an excuse for Silent Hill-style variable geography. He can even erase your memories to make more room for himself. There’s one bit where Clarence implies that you didn’t actually kill Red in the first game, but that your memory of doing so is just him messing with your head for lulz. He could be lying about that, of course. He lies a lot.

I’ve talked before about how annoying the “disembodied sidekick” in an adventure game can be even when the authors don’t intend it that way, but in this game, they just ran with it. In one scene in a library, Clarence repeatedly gives obvious hints that there’s a secret passage behind one of the bookshelves. It takes a while to find the fake book that triggers it, and while you’re looking, Clarence repeatedly berates the player’s intelligence. In most other games, this would be a bad thing, but here, it serves the authors’ purpose, which is, to make you hate Clarence even more.

When you eventually find a way to cure the virus, Clarence does everything he can to try to stop you, including, in the end, simply pleading for his life. (Strange behavior for a disease!) And despite everything he’s done to you, the simple abjectness of his position provokes some pity. You are, after all, murdering a conscious being, but what choice do you have? You can’t trust him to leave you alone. It’s him or you.

But having been infected once, you retain the ability to contact and be contacted by the hive mind, and thereby get the exposition I described back in the first paragraph. The hive mind isn’t like Clarence — it’s far more menacing. It doesn’t blame you for murder, because it too wanted Clarence dead. Not because he was evil, but because because he was too individual, too human. Fortunately, all it wants at this point is to be left alone, to have the outside world forget that it exists.

But that isn’t going to happen. We still have one more game to go.

Black Plague, the second installment of the Penumbra trilogy, starts shortly after the first left off, with Philip, the player character, waking up in a cell in a secret research station hidden under the mines. I’m immediately struck by a number of surface similarities to Half-Life: ruined-laboratory look, mutated zombie-like monsters, booby-traps made of explosives wired to laser tripwires across hallways. It’s a pretty big contrast to Penumbra: Overture in style, but the gameplay hasn’t changed much — if anything, it’s this episode plays less like Half-Life than its predecessor, as I haven’t found anything that can be used as a weapon, except perhaps some bricks I could throw. Presumably the creators got complaints about the awkwardness of melee in Overture and decided to just eliminate it.

This means that stealth is even more paramount, especially since some of those zombies have flashlights. They’re pretty smart for zombies, really, capable of speaking in coherent sentences and everything. “Zombie” is probably the wrong word. Call them “infected” if you like, because documents in the game are pretty clear that we’re dealing with an alien virus here. One that takes over your mind, or, at first, just produces a second mind, which the infected hear as a voice in their head. Red, the madman in the previous episode, wasn’t just insane from isolation, he was infected and knew it. And now Philip is too. There’s a point where you find documents describing the early symptoms of the virus, such as auditory hallucinations and déjà vu, and realize that you’ve already experienced most of them. Shortly afterward, you get a full-fledged voice in your head telling you what to do, taking over Red’s previous role as disembodied sidekick, but more antagonistic.

The interesting thing here is that it seems like the virus-personality might not be necessarily evil. It might, in your case at least, be more of a symbiosis than a disease. It’s certainly capable of being helpful, and there’s been mention made of the virus helping its host to survive (or, as in Red’s case, forcing its host to survive). To a large extent, Philip’s new brain-buddy is as new to this whole situation as Philip is; its whole personality seems to be formed from reading his memories, which means that its notion of what it is and what it should be doing is informed by its host’s expectations. The whole phenomenon is linked somehow to pre-Columbian Inuit superstitions and practices that were abandoned as demonic with the conversion to Christianity (as described in a document in the previous game — this story is starting to pull together elements that didn’t seem connected before). When the infection takes hold, you have a series of nightmarish interactive visions/hallucinations/ordeals involving elements of ritual sacrifice and elements of events in the previous game (with Red’s death qualifying as both). Until you reach the end and come back to the real world, the game basically stops feeling like Half-Life and instead feels like Silent Hill. This whole bit seems like a kind of initiatory passage through the Abyss, and I can easily imagine ancient shamans, who hadn’t yet been told that the spirits are evil, deliberately becoming infected/possessed to share their wisdom.

But then again, zombies. If the infection is supposed to be benevolent, something has clearly gone wrong. If I understand right, the virus has basically killed the original personality in these cases, and, in the process, left itself stunted. But perhaps it did this in self-defense.