Penumbra: Overture

What works

Installation works perfectly, game starts and loads, title screen and menus work flawlessly with all effects and hardware acceleration, sound and music work great, intro movie works fine (it is dynamically rendered with OGL) first level loads up and works fine. All graphical effects work perfectly from what I can see, bi/trilinear filtering, bloom, noise filter, textures, shadows, hardware T&L. Controls work fine.

What does not

The game is unplayable because once you move from the initial startpoint in the game, about 5-10 feet forward, the whole screen corrupts graphically except for one small box surrounding a red light above the door in front of you. The box which includes the red light and the wall around it renders and works great and moves correctly as per your perspective, but the entire rest of the screen flashes and is entirely composed of artifacts from the previous frames. Pressing escape to go to the menu leaves you with a corrupt screen still and the menu is unusable, you have to guess where your mouse is to exit the program. However, if you move backwards towards where you started, when you reach near the starting point the screen will go back to normal and the corruption will disappear. You can move around and the whole scene will render correctly and the camera will move correctly with your mouse movements at full framerate (50+fps in my case with a nvidia fx5500 on an athlonxp 3000+ with 512mb ram) as long as you dont stray from the start point. In this position you can press escape and access the menu to change options and exit the game, however changing the options does nothing to make the game any more playable.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Anything past the first room as it was unplayable. Did not try anybody elses saved games, did not try turning sound off or any command line switches. Attempted to install WINE 0.9.24 in a separate directory to try playing the game in a tested version but could not get it working due to lack of knowledge.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Really want to play this game, looks great :( Even though it is unplayable, the graphics seen so far look excellent and there are no differences between what I can see and what you can see in this area in Windows.