Recent reviews by The Weather Man

This game may alternatively be called: "Procrastinate your chores by doing virtual chores"
The negative:
This game is entertaining to play in about the first 10 hours and then rapidly declines in quality. Quests given by the NPCs become mind-numbing grindy chores, as you are more or less forced to complete every single sub-techtree that there is. You always lack blue points - a ressource necessary for researching most items. At first this seems balanced, as you are able to get quite a number of them through researching items and bodies, but you will soon notice that this is not enough to reach the last necessary technologies of every techtree. In order to get enough of them later on, you will need to produce items that you don't need, simply because their creating results in a few of these points.
The game heavily lacks quality-of-life features such as an expandable inventory, the ability to carry multiple big objects like logs or stones and the storage management is a hell of its own.
The characters first seem to have some promise but ultimatively, they just let you continue the grind by forcing you to produce items for them to progress. Items that you have to research and construct, sometimes by producing a whole lot of other items. This is often because there are implicit dependencies between the tech trees.
The characters also lack depth. In the first few steps of the quests, they seem like they may be rather interesting and unique but waste all of these good impressions by giving you arbitrary sidequests to prolong the game.

The weekly cycle has little meaning and in one of the last questlines, a character forces you to wait for a week, two times. Since there was literally nothing left for me to do, I spent these two ingame weeks by wacking my sword against the bed to drain my energy bar, only to be able to sleep such that time passes more quickly. This took about 5-10 minutes each. Please mind that you cannot simply hold the button for attacking, you have to do 50 presses of the spacebar to drain your stamina bar.

I do like grinding. I really liked Stardew Valley. But this game simply does not compare.
- The dialog is mostly uninspired.
- The world is way too large for the content that it contains. NPCs beside the ones giving the main quests simply do not matter at all.
- Tending to your graveyard is simply a means to an end and is only a side-chore that you can progress on while doing other chores.
- A teleport stone was patched in while I was doing my playthrough, but as this stone has a cooldown, you still need to run long distances that you simply do not want to run.
- You can farm and fish, but there is little motivation for both besides the main quests and grinding gold.
- There is a dungeon, but completing it is a grind, as there is little variations in enemies, little to no special items that justify the grind and an uninspiring end of the dungeon.
- Do not even attempt to try out alchemy without using the wiki. The alchemy system was absolutely not designed to be used without a guide at hand. Everything is pure trial and error.

The positive:
A lot of people mention that this game has a lot of potential and promise. And I did complete this game over 37 hours, so maybe there was something that kept me playing besides wanting to simply get it done and over with.
- The art style is neat, as well as the music, although I would have wished for one or two more songs to mix things up, especially in the main overworld.
- There is a donkey that insults you.
- The crafting system as well as the tech tree are engaging at first (and as I already mentioned: horrible later)
- You can dismember human bodies and e.g. make burgers out of their flesh.
- You can push about as many logs and stones vertically as you want to, sometimes glitching them!
- There are a lot of options for decorating your graveyard of which most unfortunately are only unlocked rather late into the game
- You can dump mutilated bodies into a river and no one cares.

Conclusion:
This game has about 10 hours of honest play time which you may enjoy, followed by roughly 25 hours of pure grinding. If you decide that the price point justifies these 10 hours, I do recommend buying the game. However, if you plan on completing this game, I simply cannot recommend this game to anyone. And believe me, the story is not worth the time you will invest. I am frustrated with this games (as you may have already noticed) and would wish this game to go back into development and playtesting for at least another half a year. Because ultimately, the concept of the game is very good, with horrible execution.

Penumbra is a horror game that resides in a special place in the genre of horror games, as it not only tries to scare you but rather makes you horribly miserable and lonely the more you progress. The atmosphere is really well done and while playing I felt more and more isolated, the deeper I went into the mine. If you pay attention to the details and let yourself into the mood, this game will reward you by kicking you in the balls and laughing at you while you whimper on the ground.

So much for the mood part.

The puzzle mechanics are a bit rough and unpolished, which is excusable as this is (one of?) the first games of this studio and you see quite some elements that are later refined in titles like Amnesia.
The combat system (which they thankfully removed in the second part) is pretty wonky and needs a lot of getting used to, the best option is to hide.

If you can forgive the mediocre mechanics and really need to feel down, this is the title for you.