Penumbra is FPS, paranormal thriller that promises a mind numbing, and bone-chilling experience. The main protagonist Philip gets a letter, from his long proclaimed dead father. He gets a few notebooks with indecipherable notes with a map of Greenland. Philip heads off on a wild goose chase straight from his ship to Greenland into a blizzard, into a creepy crawly mine filled with wild dogs and spiders lurking in dangerous corridors. The game is very real in some aspects, and like Fahrenheit it has tried to take the involvement of the gamer to a whole new level. Gameplay revolves around object manipulation, where one has to click and drag the mouse in the proper direction to go along with it. Hence the player feels more “involved” in the game, then the standard click-action technique. This has allowed the developers to create puzzles involving the creative handling of objects, like hooking a stray metal rod into a socket to create a lever, picking up rocks to smash frozen icicles over pathways or using rolling barrels as offense or defense. The environment compliments the game’s overall mood, the mineshaft totally dark, with lots of empty barrels and squeaky floorboards, rows of empty shelves with broken floorboards littered on the ground. Hand-to-hand combat is done with a hammer or a two-by-four with the same interaction technique. Here the designers somehow manage to mess up, the camera angle gets locked while holding the mouse button but that doesn’t affect the opponent who happily dances out of reach. Not something which signifies the end of the world but little things like these tend to ruin the game experience. The game is more about finding alternatives to direct conflict with the enemy. They seemed to have taken a leaf out of Leonardo Da Vinci’s book and applied his sfumato technique that is to blurify things to good use here. The black and white backdrops, or sepia terrains coupled with fuzzy blurry objects will make the player dread every step. The ambience is in perfect harmony with the game, from the squeaky floorboards to the growling of the dogs and the shuffling of the spiders in corners. The drums and piano underscore encapsulates the mood each time contact is made with an NPC further heightening the adrenalin. Following the recent episodic trend, total length of the game is quite short; some additional side stories would have done the game good. The new concept of moving the mouse for object interaction although is commendable, but not very practical as for that one needs quite some elbowroom. However there is a tweak to enable save games but one has to dig into the configuration files to do so. The game requires a heavy duty PC to play it in maximum settings, but what counts is that the game does have what it takes to compete with the best.