Indie horror adventure Penumbra: Overture available on Linux, coming to Mac

by John Bardinelli { May 31st 2007 at 3:58PM }

Indie developer Frictional Games announced today the Linux release of the first episode of its 3D horror game Penumbra: Overture. The PC version hit back in March and provides a solid adventure game with more spooky atmosphere than you can shake a blood-covered piece of wood at. The game emphasizes interactive physics and physics-based puzzles, not combat, meaning you'll spend more time playing with the environment than stabbing baddies. Mac gamers can take heart, as Frictional is planning a Mac port of the game some time soon.

[Via Adventure Gamers]

Tags: 3d, adventure, casual, firstperson, frictionalgames, horror, independent, indie

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

syco @ May 31st 2007 4:54PM

Due to finicky to downright incompatible binary drivers from both nVidia and ATI/AMD, getting good 3D hardware acceleration out of Linux is still quite difficult. Note that this is not the fault of Linux as an OS, but of the graphics companies refusal to submit driver sources to the kernel due to concerns about one stealing the others tech. AMD said they are going to work on it, and that's good, but meanwhile 3D gaming in Linux is still an adventure that most gamers are going to be very skeptical of. It's good that they released this on Linux, but its rarely worth it to most companies when the underlying system is so hostile to 3D acceleration.

FP @ May 31st 2007 6:08PM

@Syco
That's not completely true anymore. Distributions like Ubuntu make it about as easy to install the nvidia drivers as on Windows. AMD/ATI still have a ways to go, but I've heard they aren't much harder to simply install.

Viridium @ May 31st 2007 8:35PM

Will Frictional make the game less of a piece of crap on Linux? I tried the PC demo - it couldn't even get a resolution change done properly, let alone an adventure game. What a waste of time and bandwidth that was.

Benjamin Heckendorn @ May 31st 2007 9:22PM

This game is actually pretty cool, so is the 2006 tech demo. Episode 1 gets a bit repetitive though, and didn't run all that smoothly on my old PC, which ran stuff like BF2 just fine.

wolliam @ May 31st 2007 10:16PM

nice this is first linux/ubuntu game lol

http://clubvaio.blogspot.com/

Phreque @ May 31st 2007 11:44PM

Woo! Good to see more exposure for this one.. I remember playing through a bit back about a year ago. Good stuff! (And ya can't beat free.)

meist3r @ Jun 1st 2007 7:02AM

That game is pretty creepy to say the least. I've played the demo and it has very good atmosphere and the gfx are very nice for a Linux game (compared to some of the other crap out there). It's only 19,99$ (so 15€ for me) and I'm going to give it a try.

Linux users: Buy this! Only when someone can be successful with their sales in Linux games we will see a flourishing game market for Linux in the future.