The previous titles in the Penumbra series snared gamers through the intensity of their psychological horror styling, while thriving on a story-driven quest through nightmare and cerebral decay. This latest addition, while still very entertaining in its own right, fails to meet the gameplay requirements that fans of the series will duly be expecting.

Penumbra: Requiem deviates from the series’ adventure genre to borrow quite heavily from the unexpected smash hit Portal. It’s no bad thing for a developer to attempt to evolve a franchise by tweaking the gameplay and keeping the players on their toes, but such a deviation leaves the user feeling somewhat short-changed. When someone expects Penumbra: Black Plague but gets a Portal clone, there’s bound to be a resistance to the game’s charms.

Rather than continuing in Black Plague’s story-centric vein, Requiem breaks up the levels into bite-sized physical puzzles. Each section requires gamers to think constructively to best the nightmarish enigmas that go beyond physical challenges and adopt a psychological twist to puzzle solving. Deciphering whether the events of the conundrum are real or some kind of warped hallucinogenic experience is all part of the fun, and the ingenuity of this add-on to Black Plague works very well.  

The previous focus on plot is therefore given a back seat to a series of increasingly desperate puzzle scenarios. The stopstart nature of this gameplay – while perfectly enjoyable on a purely gaming level – doesn’t support a plot as well as a progressive set of events would, so keeping up with the dark and anxious story is severely disjointed.

But Requiem is difficult to get into mostly due to its own identity crisis. Frictional Games touts this expansion (that requires Black Plague to run) as an immediate continuation, yet the tangential gameplay seems to suggest otherwise. Were Requiem its own horror/puzzle-based game, it wouldn’t be burdened by the misconceptions that dog the player throughout the game. This would be an easy game to recommend to anyone who’s never really played any of the previous Penumbra games, but since it’s an expansion that requires the original, that will be a demographic that’s unlikely to exist.