Tom, 2009-04-21, "Character Postmortem"

[Kedjane]

In the game she was OK, I believe.
She wasn't an important person to me though, as the player didn't get to know anything about her and you never really met her and get a face to relate her voice to until she was dead.
Now it was a pretty long time ago I played through Black Plague (last fall, but that time I pretty much stressed through it) so feel free to remind me, because this could be a bit wrong.

The first time you were introducted to her it was via a computer (loved having to get the power to work for the computer/lights in that room by the way), voice-only since her webcam was broken or something alike. Felt unusually logical for the series, and in a good way too. That moment after having talked to her I felt I finally had an achieveable goal (let's face it, we saw Howard's death coming and looking for a dead guy ain't much of a goal): getting to this faceless person who obviously was alive. It felt interesting since she both was alive even though there was an infection going around and she worked with the Archaic, so she could probably give some answers. Then it also slowly revealed that she was locked in somewhere (once again very logical, considering the tuurngait). She also was pretty shy and all when she asked for help, which I really liked because it both added to the Archaic wierdness and made her a more realistic person (that was the main thing that stuck out about her personality). Never encountered a person shy to ask about getting rescued from a monster-swarming underground shelter before, usually they scream it out in your face.
Don't remember anything else, except killing her. Was pretty so-so. I liked the whole part about believing she was insane, killing her and then seeing she's completely healthy (well, dead now) but I think it should had been done with someone the player likes more than a random person they hadn't even met before. If the player had met Swanson just once before (perhaps looking through a small opening in a blocked/broken door, through the ventilation or something since making a scripted encounter is easier that way and making it unscripted would be hard) you would had felt a lot worse about killing her.
Oh! Another thing I just remembered: when Clarence sais something and Anabel goes "Did you say something?". That was great. I've probably heard something similar in a movie before (or was it Half Life 2?), where some guy was crazy... but still I really didn't see that one coming although I really should had, since now I'm playing as the crazy one.

And oh, how forgetful I am. Must have thought of it a dozen times while reading and writing but still forgot it in the end: Penumbra meaning that noone is truly good nor bad, that part was really interesting. Never thought of it that way at all, but come to think of it it's pretty much right.