New blog post on combat in Penumbra

[eliasfrost]

For our new game "Unknown" we first considered using weapons and having them as defense only. But after some playtesting, the same problems that we had in Overture popped up. Some found the combat way to easy and others found it almost impossible. As trying to configure good difficult settings would be really hard, we decided to tone down combat and make the player very vulnerable instead. Further gameplay testing seem to confirm that this was the right thing to do.

Good to hear. ^^

As for your question concerning weaponry in horror games. It's not removing the weapons that makes the game more scary. It's because when weapons are disabled, the player need to think of another solution at the same time being chased by a monster or whatever, this situation invokes stress on the player, and therefore making the player more vulnerable to scares and so on.

By having a weapon in a horrorgames gives the player a fast and easy solution to all combat related situation. There could be a way to slip in weapons into the game, like having a minimum (and I mean a minimum) amount of bullets in their gun or something. This would make the player think before using the gun. The thing with this is that in such situation, the player does not actually hesitate to use the gun, since it's such a pressured situation to be chased by a monster. When the player have "accidentaly" fired all his/her bullets, there is this even more pressured and stress-invokin situation that the player does not want to be in.