Video Game / Penumbra

aka: Penumbra Overture

You know, he really should consider looking behind him...

My name is Philip. If we are lucky, then by the time you receive this, I will be dead. If fate frowns, we all perish.

— Philip during the intro

Spanning two games and an expansion pack,^note Overture, Black Plague and Requiem respectively Penumbra is a Survival Horror series that follows physics professor Philip Buchanon, who, after attending to his mother's funeral, receives a letter from his long dead father Howard instructing him to destroy a breadcrumb trail of mysterious documents without reading them. Phillip, suffering from severe Genre Blindness, instead follows the trail to a forgotten old mine somewhere in northern Greenland, where he promptly finds himself trapped and (seemingly) alone during a blizzard.

Created by Frictional Games (the company that went on to make the equally terrifying Amnesia: The Dark Descent) Penumbra is also notable for its unique engine that allows solving puzzles through clicking, dragging, and directly interacting when using items, giving an especially genuine, immersive atmosphere that even earned Black Plague a nomination for best script (from The Writers Guild of Great Britain, that it ultimately lost to Overlord I).

The series has also spawned a few fangames: the Amnesia: The Dark Descent total conversions Necrologue and Twilight of the Archaic, and an upcoming SOMA mod called Prisoner of Fate.

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This series provides examples of:

• Abandoned Mine: Primary setting for the first game.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: A level in Requiem identifies itself as a sewer, and it has two side rooms with manholes at the top, a side room containing a generator and some transport system, and a large reservoir that you need to flood to progress to the next area. The water seems to be purified, unusual for a sewer. It follows the style meant for technical or experimental work.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The Rockworms, which you thankfully deal with very few of.
• Afterlife Antechamber: Requiem seems to be this. Logs from Eloff Carpenter and Dr. Eminess indicate they both showed up in the labyrinth right after you know they died and they have no idea how they got there.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Used at the beginning and towards the end of Black Plague.
• All Just a Dream: The good ending in Requiem is an example of this.
  • Either that, or it's the bad ending, as the Tuurngait trap Philip's mind in an eternal loop of his adventure, which he must suffer through forever, unable to die.
• All Myths Are True: There's a grain of truth in all the Inuit legends about the Tuurngait, mysterious spirits roaming the frozen wastes of northern Greenland...as you'll discover with alarming frequency from the occasionally found textbook or old newspaper article. Overlaps quite a bit with Foreshadowing.
• An Arm and a Leg: When you meet him, Dr. Eminess willingly offers to sever one of his hands and give it to you for the library scanner, but once you bring him a saw, his infection kicks in before he can do so, forcing you to instead lock Eminess in a server room, and search elsewhere for the hand.
• Ancient Astronauts: One possible explanation on how the Tuurngait came to Earth millions of years ago — "before man was even upright".
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Archaic, a secret society attempting to research the Tuurngait and mainly getting itself slaughtered. They're extremely corrupt, and willing to sacrifice the lives of lower-ranking members to protect the upper echelons. An out-of-the-way note in Black Plague reveals they were founded by Leonardo Da Vinci and are a private organization with multiple facilities across the globe who are dedicated to researching and exploiting supernatural phenomena, who pre-date the SCP Foundation by several years.
• Ancient Tomb: The Tuurngait Tomb, where the virus was released from. A section of it makes up the first level of Requiem, and a more thorough exploration serves as one of the last levels of Necrologue.
• Apocalyptic Log: Over and over — this is a horror game, after all. First with Dr. Roberts' (the spider hater) insane diary, then with Eloff Carpenter (who recorded on cassette his horrifying final moments) and at last, with Philip himself.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: While in the infirmary, you stumble across a note detailing when using the Cryo-stasis chamber is deemed acceptable. The list of permissible ailments include "cardiomyopathy, glaucoma, polio, diabetes, or halitosis (bad breath)."
• Artificial Stupidity: The zombie dogs in Overture only notice the player if they're in their direct line of sight. While walking normally will alert them to the player's presence, crouch-walking completely negates that to the point that the player can simply walk right past them even mere feet away from them and not be found out.
• Badass Bookworm: Philip is definitely a Non-Action Guy, but even he has his occasional moments of badassery.
• Backtracking: There is some, but fortunately, it doesn't take too long and tries to avoid becoming Filler.
• Bag of Spilling: Justified both times.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the start of Overture the player keeps finding journal entries about giant spiders and finding giant webs scattered around caves and tunnels and is then attacked by zombie dogs.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: A rather hard to find (and Door Stopping) note in the UV light room talks of a scientist from the Shelter who read research papers on the Rock Worms. At the end, it says that he tied a noose. "Those monsters may feed on my corpse, but they won't take my life."
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Tuurngait and Clarence for Black Plague. The Tuurngait is responsible for unleashing the virus, which created the Infected along with the other mutated creatures Philip encounters in the mine, while Clarence is an Enemy Within Philip's mind who's just as big a threat to him as the Infected. The Tuurngait can be considered the Big Bad for the whole series, however.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending of Black Plague. Philip is doomed and everyone else in the complex is dead, but Philip manages to send a message to the outside world that will hopefully cause the Tuurngait to be destroyed.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Tuurngait are apparently some sort of sentient semi-parasitic virus from an unknown world. They also have the traditional Hive Mind element to them and are capable of altering the genetic structure and nervous system of other living beings.
• Black Comedy: Clarence embodies this trope readily.
• Blooper Reel: Entering a code unlocked in the Golden Ending of Requiem plays an audio file of Red's voice actor trying to get his lines right.
• Body Horror: There's a reason why everyone in the Archaic has a Cyanide Pill — in case it would come in handy... The infected has their skin take on a nasty color, it looks like part of their intestines were ripped out and attached to their genitalia, and they go bald among other things.
• Bookcase Passage: Drawing a specific book from a bookcase in Black Plague will reveal a hidden room.
• Book Ends: The email at the beginning of Overture is also the Epilogue Letter in Black Plague.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In Penumbra: Black Plague you get past several security scanners like this, using blood to enter the kitchen, then a hand and head to enter the library. Interestingly, one door that leads to the cryogenic freezer has a hand scanner that when you try to scan the hand you have likely procured at this point, tells you that the person whom this hand belongs to is in critical condition and will not accept it.
• Broken Record: In Requiem, a tape player gets stuck in a playback loop on a short phrase, despite it being empty. Later, the PA suffers from the same issue, and the announcer thanks you for fixing it before continuing with the intended message.
• Cat Scare: Clarence sometimes gives you visions of attacking dogs and spiders from Overture, though they vanish once they get close.
• Central Theme: Several...
  • The consequences of pursuing answers to our questions. Will we be satisfied with the answers we find, or will they only serve to doom us? By the end of the game, Archaic is utterly decimated, and Philip is facing death at the hands of the Tuurngait.
  • Individuality vs. Community. Is one more moral than the other? Furthermore, is one significantly more selfish and thus, less deserving of life than the other? Philip and especially Clarence both show signs of being Jerkass characters, the former with his lying to the Tuurngait about being willing to protect them and sending the message to destroy them entirely, but the Tuurngait don't seem like saints themselves given they slaughtered all of Archaic, claiming "self-defense" and almost praising their community over individuals, believing them insignificant compared to the whole.
• Chekhov's Gun: Armstrong's Mixture, to some extent in Overture. Shows up as a page in an explosives manual you find very early in the game but isn't actually used until very near the end where you use it to blow your way through to Red.
• Chekhov's Skill: Clarence's ability to make the player hallucinate comes back in a big way during one extended sequence near the end of the game.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Tom Redwood, a.k.a. "Red". He constantly insults, amuses and helps you in Overture. All at the same time. He's both an unusual guide and a very memorable character, to say the least. When you finally manage to reach him, you have to unwillingly partake in a rather gruesome Twist Ending. After that you finally discover the secrets of Red's past and explore the isolated and squalid living spaces he had to occupy for thirty extremely lonely years. Cue Tear Jerker. No wonder the poor sap went gradually insane.
  • Subverted terrifyingly with Dr. Richard Eminiss in Black Plague. He first seems to follow these tropes, but quickly turns out to be anything but humorous...
• Concealing Canvas: An Air-Vent Passageway is hidden behind an odd painting in Black Plague.
• Contrived Coincidence: How Philip managed to get into an abandoned mine which was exactly where he would find the secret research station where his father worked.
• Cool Gate: Portals serve as gateways between levels in Requiem, and another at the end of Necrologue leads to the Tuurngait world from Black Plague.
• Cowardly Lion: If Philip so much as looks at a monster for too long, there'll be a lens flare, and he'll freak out and give away his position. That said, he never gives up, and he thinks and fights his way out of situations that kill everyone around him.)
• Cult: The Archaic Elevated Caste again, though they deny it. They don't seem to be explicitly religious in any way, lack any sort of unifying symbol and have few official rites, etc. They're more like a secular, Mad Scientist version of this.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Implied for Philip and his father, Howard, the latter requesting that several cryptic documents be destroyed. These letters contain the directions to the Greenland Mine in which the horrible events of Overture occur.
• Darkness Equals Death: The Kennels in Black Plague, in which you are likely to be eaten by a grue. A major part of the puzzle there is manipulating the malfunctioning electrical lighting to allow Philip to pass otherwise dangerous zones safely.
• Deadpan Snarker: Clarence in Black Plague leaves loads of condescending comments on the plot development.
• Déjà Vu: In Black Plague, feelings of deja vu are one of the early symptoms of infection by the Tuurngait virus. The first time you learn this, this particular bit of info is repeated twice, presumably to unnerve the player. And it's fitting, as the player character is already infected.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Generally averted. In the first two games, this is to your benefit, since often you'll need that chair to barricade the door against whatever is pounding it down. That said, there are plenty of breakables in the form of ketchup bottles, Scotch bottles, etc.
• Diegetic Interface: Besides the inventory window (default key TAB) and an optional tiny crosshair, there is basically no HUD at all.
• Dissonant Serenity: Early on in Overture, you'll find the logs of a man who made a habit of studying and devouring the local spiders. You'll find an equally cheerful log not much later about how he had to remove his own tongue after he realized it absorbed too many spider toxins..
• Doom Magnet: Anyone who Philip meets who isn't dead likely will be when he gets within 5 feet of them.
• Door to Before: The chemical labs have an emergency door, which you can open by sabotaging the flow of chemicals in the lab itself, but only after you get past cameras, enemies, and security puzzles. And then there's the matter of going through the hallway the door leads to...
• Downer Ending: Black Plague ends with Phillip giving into the human desire for revenge on the Tuurngait and sending a message to close friend, instructing them to come to the mine and "kill them all", ultimately perpetuating the cycle started by his father, which brought him to the mine in the first place. Requiem isn't much better. Either Philip dies in the room, or he's forced to undergo a "Groundhog Day" Loop, doomed to repeat the events of the series.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: The announcement voice, on the CD-ROM briefing in Black Plague, and in some of the surreal parts of Requiem.
• Enemy Within: Clarence, the Tuurngait's personal representative within your skull. He spends half of Black Plague trying to kill you and the other half trying to keep you alive so he doesn't die too. It really doesn't help that he can give you hallucinations at will.
• Ethereal Choir: The unsettling choral track that plays in the Rock Worm Lab of Overture, and the final areas of Overture and Black Plague.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: After Clarence tricks Phillip into killing Dr. Swanson, he jokes about a piece of her skull being on his shoe.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Seen during the Tuurngait's mental test near the end of Black Plague, and the climax of Necrologue involves climbing it from bottom to top.
• The Faceless: Every normal human who isn't already dead when you encounter them.
• Faking the Dead: Gets you into the Archaic's cryogenics facility so you can steal one of the heads and use it to pass a retinal scanner.
• Fetch Quest:
  • Done throughout (they are Adventure games, after all), and lampshaded in Black Plague.
    Clarence: Christ! Go here, go there, fetch this, run me a bath... typical broad, atypical circumstances.
    Red: Really, the hunger is becoming... rather uncomfortable here... How far away are you? You cannot be far. I am held captive by a wall of stone in the northeast of the mine. As in any drama, there are many roles to be played. You must act the scientist in mixing potions, act the renegade in plots of destruction...
  • In other words, you need to make an improvised explosive and blast through the cave-in separating you from the part of the mine inhabited by Red.
• Exploding Barrels: Played with in the series.
  • In the first section of Overture, Philip has to set up a barrel of TNT and make a fuse to blow down a cave-in.
  • Propane canisters in later areas play this straight.
• Fighting from the Inside: Each person who contracts The Virus goes through a Battle in the Center of the Mind, and almost everyone loses and becomes one of the Infected. Red, a Cloudcuckoolander miner in Overture, managed to win and retain partial self-control. In the second game, you go through such a fight yourself, with a win meaning you just have to put up with Clarence. Howard apparently managed it as well, but he was Driven to Suicide. Dr. Eminess seemed to have won, but once you give him a saw, that's clearly not true.
• Find the Cure!: Justified for once — The Tuurngait doesn't just want you dead.
• First-Person Ghost: That must be a pretty long glowstick for you to not see Phillip's hand.
• For Science!: The Archaic, as already hinted at in the Cult trope entry.
• Framing Device: The first two games are framed around an email from Philip to an unspecified individual, explaining why he failed to do something that needed to be done, and has to ask another to complete the task. What exactly he's talking about isn't fully explained until the end of Black Plague. The expansion pack takes place immediately after.
• Freeware Game: The original tech demo that started it all (it was created for a Swedish game development contest). The whole series is practically a Continuity Reboot and Adaptation Expansion of the tech demo's basic plot.
• From Bad to Worse: In the first game, your only enemies were rabid dogs, large spiders, and the occasional mutant worm. The enemies of the next game... are much worse.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The Infected.
• Gainax Ending: Requiem is this to the series as a whole. Uniquely, the plot was already mostly wrapped up in Black Plague anyway.
• Game Within a Game: A program on Amabel's computer labeled "schmup.exe" happens to be a fully operational space shooter minigame. But to open it, you have to have collected every document and artifact in Black Plague to see the password.
• Giant Spider: In any other game, they'd be Goddamn Bats. In Overture, they're still weaker than everything else you encounter. Thankfully, they're not actually gigantic — just a bit overgrown.
• Genre-Busting: It's an Adventure Survival Horror Stealth-Based Game, with all the in-game manipulation controls and motions being based on dynamic real time physics...
• Gory Discretion Shot: Shortly after Philip wakes up at the start of Black Plague, someone in the adjacent cell begs for his life before being hacked up and dragged away by one of the Infected. We only get to hear this happen through the wall of Philip's cell.
• Grail in the Garbage: One of the artefacts in Black Plague is located in a trash bin.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The final choice Philip is presented with in Black Plague. If he had done as the Tuurngait wanted and asked the reader to remove all evidence of the Shelter, the Tuurngait, who seem a little too eager to assimilate the "invaders", would stay alive, likely indefinitely, and the Shelter would become a second tomb for the Tuurngait. When he asks the reader to have the Tuurngait destroyed, he is killing off an ancient and wise being older than man that sowed pieces of its knowledge into our species.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: An Infected isolated from the rest of the Tuurngait is generally not very bright.
• Hair-Trigger Explosive: Unsurprisingly, a flask of Armstrong's Mixture acts as this towards the end of the game, and dropping it anywhere but the proper spot is an instant fatal explosion.
• Heal Thyself: Painkillers. For that matter, just walking around in circles can bring you from "I can't feel my arms and legs" to "I'm as fit as can be expected" pretty quickly. File it under Acceptable Breaks from Reality, given how fast your HP can go back down.
• Hearing Voices: Philip hears voices whispering unintelligible words at various points in Overture and Black Plague. It's implied that these are the early stages of the Tuurngait virus.
• He Knows About Timed Hits:
  • In Overture, Philip uses Inner Monologue at some points to explain game mechanics like grabbing objects and stealth.
  • Black Plague isolates this to an optional tutorial in the main menu.
• Hellhound: The first enemy type in Overture. They're rather quick, and their HP is so high some walkthroughs mistake them for Invincible Minor Mooks, but they can't jump too high, and they're easily distracted with a piece of beef jerky.
• Heroic Mime: Lampshaded by Clarence right as he comes into existence after Philip's out-of-body experience.
  Clarence: "Well, thanks for the help. I'm having an existential nightmare, and you can't even say a word!"
• He Who Fights Monsters: One of the interpretations of the ending in Black Plague.
• His Name Is...: Eloff Carpenter records his final words on a cassette tape and says he knows the primary weaknesses of the Tuurngait, but before he can spit it out he's apparently dragged off and killed. "The species' primary weakness is—uugggh!"
• How We Got Here: The intro cutscene of each installment.
• Hope Spot: On the "Surface Station" level of Requiem, there's a helipad that Philip thinks is his ticket to escape. But when he gets the satellite dish running, the transmission he can send only calls in an air supply drop of items that can get him to the next level.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: In an ironic twist, the Eldritch Abomination Tuurngait is actually terrified of humanity as a whole, since even though it is a powerful Hive Mind, it can't possibly assimilate them all and stands no chance against humans if they learn about its existence.
• Humans Are Bastards: That's what the Tuurngait thinks, anyways. If you pass its moral tests, it declares you an example of My Species Doth Protest Too Much — then you write in the email that it was wrong and give the coordinates to the mine, with the instructions "kill them all."
• 100% Completion:
  • In Black Plague, statistics at the end tell you how many artifacts and documents you collected, and collecting them all rewards you with a code both to an encrypted development folder in the game files, and a hidden minigame on Amabel's computer.
  • Requiem just has artifacts, but they actually serve a purpose — collect them all, and you unlock the Golden Ending.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Red, because he's too heavily controlled by The Virus. Clarence because of a pretty logical reason: "How do you use a chainsaw when you don't have any hands?"
• Improvised Screwdriver: In Black Plague, Philip has to flatten a coin in a vice to use as a makeshift screwdriver that can uncover a vent leading out of his cell. The coin can also be used in a soda machine later.
• Improvised Weapon: You swing an actual hammer. Later on you find a small pickaxe (or ice-pick), but you're still pretty heavily outclassed. Then along comes the second game, which offers you no straightforward weapons at all. As in Overture, you can still stun enemies by throwing objects at them, but other than that, you can only rely on your own feet and the patient use of stealth this time.
  • Word of God stated that the weapons were removed because they were intended to be used for defense, but turned into a Cherry Tapping tool.
  • One of the puzzles in Black Plague requires you to create a makeshift Aerosol Flamethrower.
• Individuality Is Illegal: Why the Tuurngait rejects and destroys Clarence once you manage to purge him from your mind. He's simply become too unique to reintegrate.
• Indy Escape: Once with an actual boulder, once with a rockworm.
• Infinite Flashlight: The glowstick that Philip begins the story with casts a slightly shorter-ranged and more tinted light than the flashlight, and never runs out. Except at the start of Necrologue, it's dead as a dodo.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: In the first game there's a fence gate blocking access to the deeper parts of the mine and it's locked from the other side by a wooden plank. If you can't just lift the plank behind the bars or use a nearby box to jump over the fence, you are required to find a saw.
• Interface Screw: The mere existence of Clarence is this trope.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The Infected are generally this, but contrary to popular belief, enough physics object impacts can actually kill one.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The Tuurngait states that the selfishness of human would be catastrophic and that all humans pull in different directions. Well, the Tuurngait is no saint, but it does have a point. People were supposed to be selfless and kill themselves or lock themselves up if they became infected. Many people didn't and turned into monsters that proceeded to kill or infect everyone else. The problem compounded itself until approximately 99.22% (100% minus the odds of survival given by the computer in Dr. Swanson's office) of the staff were dead.
• Ludicrous Precision: Dr. Eminiss remembers his day of birth... 3.46993412 recurring minutes past nine, indicating almost nano-second precision. He later gives the time since something last good happened, down to tenth of a second.
• Laser Hallway:
  • Black Plague has packs of explosives rigged with lasers, which can be disabled through a small puzzle near them, or switches.
  • Requiem is more of a hallucinatory type. Malfunctioning blue lasers in one area, while harmless to Philip, cause the ball required in a puzzle to teleport back to the start. Another level has a ring of red lasers that disintegrate anything on contact — even resistant to any object held towards it.
• Lord British Postulate: Although the Infected in Black Plague are supposed to be unkillable by the player (due to you not having any weapons, unlike Overture), it actually is possible to kill them with objects as they still take physics damage (although this is still quite difficult to pull off).
• MacGyvering: A lot of the puzzles and threat-elimination are based on this. Some are a little more complicated, but it's pretty much justified, since Philip is a professional physicist.
• Malevolent Architecture:
  • Why did that electrified cord have to land in that puddle of water? That's just one of the many questions you'll be asking.
  • Why did those damn steam pipes had to be damaged, spraying dangerously hot steam everywhere ?
• Mental World: Black Plague has the first instance, where Philip finds himself in the ship room. Requiem follows, being fully within the mental realm.
• Metaphorgotten: Red compares his emotions to "a disobedient pet: uncontrollable, and often rolling in shit."
• Mind Screw:
  • Requiem in particular.
  • Clarence from Black Plague — he can make you hallucinate, after all — not to mention his attempts to "make more space" in his new home.
    Clarence: Simply put... you see what I want you to see.
• Missing Secret: At one point, Philip finds a note with strange writing that he can't read. Clarence says that he can, but doesn't reveal what it says.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Phillip felt horrible when he unintentionally killed Dr. Swanson, courtesy of Clarence and his Mind Screw.
• Mysterious Antarctica: Not set in Antarctica, but still a great Video Game example of the "arctic wastes horror" genre. The whole series takes place in an unspecified location somewhere in the far north of Greenland. The atmosphere is captured brilliantly — from the very arrival aboard a chartered fishing boat to the discovery of the secret base's well-hidden entrance.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Both the Steam promotion for Penumbra: Overture and on the official website there's a screenshot where the player is attacked by one of the spider enemies (with more coming out of a hole in the roof). Spiders are enemies in the hole from the screenshot, but there aren't any spiders in the room shown. There's also a screenshot from one of the Rockworm chases, but the button is in the wrong place.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Clarence tricks Philip into killing Amabel just as she was about to cure him, rubbing it in his face after the fact.
  Clarence: Oh, one thing, before you get too overwhelmed with glee — I know murder can be a lot of fun, but... didn't you quite like that broad? Hey, I think that's a piece of her skull on your shoe. Wait, don't tell me you really thought... I thought you knew I was pulling your leg! Oh my, best laid plans, and all that... this, this is just terrible. Oh, you silly billy... Come on monkey... take a joke.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Kennels in Black Plague. You never see the monster, presumably an insane, mutated version of Overseer Frisk, who has an aversion to light.
• Notice This:
  • As in BioShock, you can turn it off for greater immersion.
  • In Black Plague, Clarence shows a demonstration on a random, non-interactive object.
• "Open!" Says Me: Most doors need a key, but there are some that opens by force. For example, Requiem's Residential stage has a fuse box that can be bashed open by throwing a rock (or a book) at it.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Infected. And not only human ones.
• Potion-Brewing Mechanic: In the first two games.
  • In Overture, You have to mix two of six chemicals in a flask, in order to create Armstrong's Mixture to blow open a pile of rubble that Red is trapped behind.
  • In Black Plague, you have to find several chemicals in the lab which you then pour in a machine, and mix using an array of buttons (in the correct order, of course) to produces the antidote to The Virus.
• Powerful Pick: It takes a little practice to master, but the pickaxe (and the weaker hammer) can become a powerful and invaluable tool and melee weapon, once you get the hang of it.
• Psychological Horror: The core premise of the games, as highlighted in the Nothing Is Scarier entry. It's all very well executed, often with many subversions of classic horror tropes. It also makes very effective use of various Primal Fears.
• Puzzle Boss:
  • Amabel. You need to turn a wheel to raise a crate, then drop it on her head. The real problem isn't figuring out what to do, but doing it while she keeps rushing you.
  • The rockworms, Dr. Eminiss and Clarence (in his materialised form) are other obvious examples.
• Ragdoll Physics: Mostly averted, but not completely.
• Sandworm: Or more precisely, a "giant gray rockworm". The real Invincible Minor Minion, and it can also kill you in one hit. Fortunately, there are only two or three of them.
• Save Point: Voluntary savepoints are done in an interesting fasion: They're ancient cylindrical lantern-like artifacts apparently brought to Earth by the Tuurngait and later rediscovered when the mine and underground base were built in the 20th century. Unfortunately, these strange objects help the Tuurngait see into your mind and secretly infest it.
• Screw Destiny: One possible way to view the ending of Black Plague is that Phillip refuses to be the Tuurngait's pawn.
• Shout-Out: Lots. For instance, Howard's and Philip's names hint at H. P. Lovecraft himself, and the Archaic's library contains copies of The Necronomicon and De Vermiis Mysteries.
  • Several food cans are labelled "Uncle Cthullhu's Squid Soup".
  • The crowbar from Overture, needed for solving a puzzle, was previously owned by some long-dead arctic explorer named Freeman. In Black Plague the Tuurngait Infected have a blood goatee, Black Eyes of Evil (which resemble glasses from far away), and some wield crowbars.
  • The storytelling is heavily inspired by Poe and Lovecraft. Also, the plot and atmosphere is very similar to John W. Campbell's short story Who Goes There?, famously adapted to film by John Carpenter as The Thing (1982).
  • Clarence (Phillips's Dark Side) has a voice strikingly similar to his namesake from the classic holiday movie It's a Wonderful Life. He even references the movie in a cheerful fashion when he chooses himself a name while fully infecting and mentally torturing Philip.
  • The Donkey Kong-like area in Requiem, where flaming barrels roll down several vertically adjacent slopes while music that sounds suspiciously familiar.
• Silent Protagonist: Philip is an interesting subversion, since he narrates the intro cutscenes and you can read his thoughts and ideas about an object or situation in-game after clicking the right mouse button.
• Slow Electricity: Appears several times within the series.
  • Overture ends with lights in a hallway clicking out one by one before Philip gets kidnapped. Revisiting this area in Necrologue also re-enacts this.
  • Black Plague involves a set of faulty lights clicking on and off that Philip must navigate to avoid a light-fearing monster.
• Stealth-Based Game: You can try to fight anything you come across, but considering that you only have a pickaxe, do you want to? Not to mention that you're utterly weaponless in the two sequels (if you don't count object-throwing). Philip even lampshades the need for stealth in one of the earliest levels of Overture (where things start looking really serious).
• Story Breadcrumbs: The Apocalyptic Log is scattered up in individual notes to be found along the quest.
• Subsystem Damage: The most basic sort: when you're injured, you limp.
• Surreal Horror: The events in the games get gradually more and more bizarre, especially in Black Plague and Requiem.
• Taking You with Me: Clarence word-for-word when he gives up begging for his life. And remember how he can cause hallucinations?
• Take That!: The server manual in Black Plague ends with this.
  "By popular demand, the server no longer requires the latest version of Windows to function correctly."
• Tap on the Head: At the beginning of Requiem, with what sounds like a shovel, courtesy of one of the Infected.
• Tempting Fate: Traveling on your own and completely alone to the most isolated regions of Greenland in search for answers about your father's mysterious past requires either utter Genre Blindness or "I've got nothing to lose" sentiments.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: In the first two games, and the two fangames. The Requiem expansion uses an Infinite Flashlight (if you're hallucinating it all, there's no need to hallucinate battery charge drain).
• This Is Gonna Suck: Entering the incinerator with Red at the end of Requiem results in Red saying this line in the frankest way possible.
  Red: Thank you, my friend. This...is going to hurt. [Incinerator starts]
• Tick Tock Tune: Heard during Philip's out-of-body experience.
• Tron Lines: Twice in Requiem, a heavy metal ball engraved with this — complete with the signature "T" on one side — has to be rolled around and used as a power source for a couple of puzzles.
• Unobtainium: The Archaic has discovered seventy different kinds.
• Where It All Began: Philip returns to the fishing boat from Overture in his out-of-body-experience, and again in one ending of Requiem.
• Vader Breath: The music for the Chemical Laboratory in Black Plague has heavy breathing in the background. Philip also does this whenever he uses the gas mask.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • In Black Plague you can set a Tuurngait on fire at one point. Then it turns out there's a door right behind it that only a zombie would be strong enough to tear down.
  • Especially bad if you pulled the lever to find out What Does This Button Do?, as the Infected will walk right into it. Then the puzzle can't be solved without taking the same approach to a different lever.
• The Virus: Called such in-game, it's how the Tuurngait replenishes itself. Interestingly, it apparently began as a mutually beneficial Mental Fusion, or so the Hive Mind claims.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Subverted in Overture — Red can only contact you via walkie talkie, has no idea where you are or whether you're still alive, but he's so lonely he keeps talking. Played straight with Amabel Swanson in Black Plague, and sort of bent in Requiem as Red, Dr. Eminiss, and the bland voice on the intercom all counsel and taunt you.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • Well, it fits the theme, but one puzzle requires you to set yourself on fire so a trap will malfunction and someone else can get through it safely. Incidentally, stupidity is not the only option—it's just the only moral one (as well as the only one that allows you to go on with the game).
  • Not to mention another puzzle where you have to inject yourself with an unknown chemical in order to put yourself in a chemically-induced coma so that the door you need to go through will be unlocked. The function of the item is actually explained in a nearby note, but it is entirely possible to miss it and arrive at this result anyway through good old experimentation.
• Wham Line: The last line of Black Plague.
  Philip: [Typing an email] The North-Western Mine is located at reference N81.6914, W58.3154. Kill them. Kill them all.

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Necrologue provides examples of:

• Back from the Dead: The game starts by Philip finding that Amabel isn't as dead as previously believed, enforced when you go back to her lab, revealing that the infected that you killed never was Amabel to begin with. Clarence also makes a return visit (not that he enjoys it), given that the events of Requiem had more than likely been Philip's re-infection.
• Big Red Button: During a power outage, Clarence messes with Philip by tricking him into thinking that a button like this would solve everything, only to reveal it as another hallucination.
• The Cameo: Eloff Carpenter turns up in an infirmary halfway through the game, and Clarence warns Philip not to touch him, implying that he's in an out-of-body experience.
• The Can Kicked Him: A corpse appears propped up on a toilet in one area, and reading a note near it reveals that the person in question was someone whom the Tuurngait hacked up and dragged away from the cell next to yours at the beginning of Black Plague.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Just when Philip manages to rotate a bridge to connect with a building where Amabel is located, the bridge inevitably collapses under him and dumps Philip back into the mines. With everything that's happened up to that point, he ultimately decides to just give up on Amabel, thinking nothing good would come if they met, and instead focuses on escaping.
• Disappeared Dad: Literal example. Looking around the library again reveals Howard's corpse as missing, and the finale reveals him having teleported to the Tuurngait world.
• Doom Magnet: Clarence mocks Philip with this, after a rock worm kills Jayla Kwon just as he gets close to her.
• The Greys: A statue within the innermost portions of the Tuurngait tomb implies that said creatures used to be this.
• Humanity on Trial: At the end, where the Tuurngait finally reveals its true self. It expresses disgust over your betrayal, and how humans think they're clever, but always end up blindly following each other. Then the Tuurngait decides that they should never have interacted with humans, and forces you to make a choice. (see Multiple Endings below)
• Multiple Endings: You can either follow Howard as he jumps off the tower and leave the Tuurngait be, or run back down and destroy it once and for all.
• Non-Standard Game Over: One puzzle involves creating an acid that can melt metal, to corrode a padlock. But you also have the option to use it on one of the save points like the previous science team members tried to.
• Send in the Search Team: Jayla Kwon, in charge of a rescue team who received your email, and sent in to scrape out survivors from the Shelter. Subverted if you listen to her last message, which reveals that she was actually hired by the Archaic to cover up the entire accident.
• Time Travel: Blue variants of the save point artifact have this ability, but only in a particular spot and for a short amount of time. This is mainly used to get around things that are completely blocked in the present day.
• Trash the Set: Revisiting some locations from Black Plague reveals places that caved in over time. Philip figures that the Rock Worms did this and will eventually destroy and bury the rest of the Shelter before long.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Near the end of the game, Clarence mentally tortures you one last time, while saying that his role has been fulfilled, then "leaves" Philip's mind for reasons unknown.
• Welcome Back, Traitor: Upon your returning to the Tuurngait world, it notices your presence, and is not happy over your betrayal of them in Black Plague.
• Where It All Began: A turning point in the game weaves the whole trilogy together; starting with the Residential level of Requiem, connected to a fan-made set of rooms that link the ending corridor of Overture with the beginning of Black Plague, making it clear that Philip has been Going in Circles the whole time. You can even see Overture's ending eerily replay itself if you go far enough.

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