Penumbra Overture
Worth it · Action · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $9.99.
- Length
- 5.5h
- Value
- $1.82/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, Radeon 8500 / Geforce 3(MX4 Not supported), 799 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Penumbra: Overture is a first person survival horror game, emphasizing on survival and problem solving instead of mindless violence and gore.
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.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.99. That was December 2018. 34 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 80 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart.
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 74 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Amnesia: The Dark Descent ($19.99, scores 71) beats it on value, while it beats Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition ($9.99, scores 63).
Critics scored it 73. Players sit 17 points higher at 90 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 512 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 79 percent of the 498 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 13 percent of everything written about it.
Players
5 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
After playing through the first two Amnesia games and SOMA, I was highly interested in exploring the origins of Frictional Games' catalogue. After starting Penumbra: Overture I quickly realised that it was much closer to an alpha version of Amnesia than I had anticipated. It runs on an earlier version of the same engine and features most of the same gameplay elements. The story is far more vague and doesn't really...
i love and hate this game, i love frictional games and have played most of their games on steam, but this one is a bit older and might feel a little more agitating than most (freaking dogs that i hate), but its worth it if you really like this franchise. the story is really well made, i just wouldnt play this game again lol but im happy to finish it too.
I didn't really enjoy this one. I've heard so many good things about the Penumbra series so I was really excited to play this but ended up going away very disappointed. Maybe if I had played this when it came out I would appreciated it more but as it stand today, it is a deeply outdated game that isn't scary nor fun to play and has been outclassed in every way. I think Overture has a very strong start but it falls...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Penumbra Overture scores 68/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/22180/penumbra-overtureThe 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.