Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition
Fair · Action · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $9.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Reviews
- 94% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, Radeon 8500/GeForce 3 (GeForce4MX not supported). Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Surrounded by enemies and assaulted by terror from all sides, Philip must collect clues and solve vexing puzzles while combating the gnawing psychological terrors that assail his mind and threaten to strip him of his sanity.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
- How long it takes to beat isn't in our data. We scored it as a typical Action game (about 6 hours) and docked the score for the missing length.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.99. That was December 2018. It has been discounted 31 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 4 percent on value. It is pricier than 74 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Penumbra Overture ($9.99, scores 68) beats it on value, while it beats Amnesia: Rebirth ($29.99, scores 36).
Critics scored it 78. Players sit 16 points higher at 94 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 392 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 2 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 308 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
Players
4 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition scores 63/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). Length is estimated at 6 hours, not measured, so the score is docked. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/22120/penumbra-black-plague-gold-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 3, price as of Sep 22.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.