Confirming what we all suspected: Greenland is a place of great evil.
In adventure games there are only so many times you can strap a cell phone to a cat to distract an NPC before you jump up, swat aside your monitor, and bellow "Blast! This doesn’t make sense!" at an unsuspecting family member or roommate. It took a while for developers to hear the cries of sheer bewilderment and disorientation from their faithful player base, and thankfully those pleas’ sonic reverberations jiggled through the Earth’s particles and into the minds of Frictional Games when they started planning the Penumbra series. The follow up to Overture, Black Plague is the second and final Penumbra game, and the better of the two.
Perhaps the best part about Black Plague is, quite simply, that the puzzles generally make sense. Use a lighter on a barrel of oil to set it on fire. Put a coin in a pop machine to get a can. Soak a cloth in alcohol to make if flammable. I’m getting pretty fed up with adventure games that try to tell a story, but then fracture all sense of pacing and continuity by forcing you to spend hours running between locales, trying to figure out how dials in one room are affected by punching keypads and manipulating jigsaw puzzles in another. As you sneak your way toward uncovering the Shelter’s true nature and what lies beyond, you might get tripped up here and there by puzzles, but even if you’re stumped the eventual solution won’t strike you as unintuitive for the sake of padding gameplay hours. One issue with making the puzzles more comprehensive is, by the end, it feels as though not enough was done with the physics-focused adventure to really stand out, or really wow you. Some of the puzzles are fairly pedestrian and tend to repeat themselves, the valves and switches in particular. Even so, it’s a far less frustrating experience than with more traditional point-and-click adventure games.
Gameplay
