I was browsing the net this morning when I came upon an enthusiastic post, on the Blog of Helios, plugging the Penumbra Collection, on sale for $5 US this weekend, July 18th to the morning of the 20th of July, presumably US time.

Penumbra is a point and click style first person adventure for Linux, Mac and Windows that was launched to some pretty good reviews. I vaguely recall reading about it, but it disappeared off my radar.

At $5 US, I had to have another look, especially since that translates into Australian $6.66 , and as it's a horror type game, I just couldn't resist it that evil price. I also picked up a second license for a friend.

Checking the system specs it says that Penumbra is 32bit only, but I had no trouble running in on my 64 bit system, which means that's either no longer a requirement, or I've got the necessary libraries already installed to let it run. Either way, it works in 64bit Ubuntu. Installation was as easy as granting execute permission on the installer then double clicking it. No command line witchcraft necessary.

The only slight issue I had was when I tried to turn all the graphical features up to high. Restarting the game just presented me with a black screen and a mouse pointer, leaving no option but a power cycle to get back to the desktop. Reinstalling the game fixed the graphics issue by resetting the configuration file, so I was a little more cautious tweaking the settings after that and I've had no issues since.

If you're a Linux gamer, into the horror or adventuring genres then you should check out the Penumbra Collection. Even if you missed the weekend special, the game is normally priced at an affordable $20 US.