There's even a female voice-over who, occasionally, directly addresses you. Its overall structure is more like that of Portal - a series of disconnected stages. In Requiem, there's no coherent narrative or physical path. You felt as though you were making progress, moving from location to location, deeper and deeper into the mysterious facility known as the Shelter. With Overture and Black Plague, a narrative thread is what drew you through the various switch-throwing, block-stacking challenges. With Requiem, Frictional Games' expansion pack that picks up right after Black Plague left off, the developer seems to have gone in a different direction, and in the process cut away some of the most appealing parts of the previous games. It's+all+about+the+puzzles+this+time+around. It's nothing really revolutionary (see Half-Life 2), but it works to more solidly root you in the game world and is a refreshing change in a genre that, at times, seems to have become almost irrevocably stale. The same goes for doors, hatches, switches, and valves. Pull back harder and the drawer opens faster. Pulling back on the mouse with a grip on a desk drawer pulls back the drawer. With a click you grab hold of objects and with mouse motions you control them. Your mouse cursor on the screen works like a hand. What are the traditional frustrations, you ask? Well, the labyrinthine logic sometimes required to solve puzzles, or the trial-and-error nature of many other adventure titles have gotten tiring at this point in the genre's evolution, and Penumbra rather effortlessly ducks underneath those complications by utilizing a pseudo-realistic physics system. They may not be pretty, but they provide a solid horror-adventure experience devoid of the traditional frustrations of the genre. Though there are certainly some frustrating aspects of the overall series, particularly with Overture's combat, I'd still highly recommend you go back and check those games out. It's a first-person adventure game of sorts, and in the series you're given control of protagonist Philip as he runs a Lovecraftian gauntlet of horrors in search of his father somewhere in the frozen wastes of Greenland. The Penumbra series has, through its past two titles Overture and Black Plague, done two things particularly well: generated a distinctive, genuinely frightening atmosphere and delivered enjoyable puzzles and challenges.

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