ScummVM gets support for the survival horror Penumbra Overture from the Amnesia developers

By Liam Dawe - 1 Sep 2025 at 12:53 pm UTC

Penumbra Overture was the first survival horror game from Frictional Games released all the way back in 2007, and now ScummVM is getting support for it. Long before the release of Soma and the Amnesia series, this is where Frictional Games started off.

ScummVM is an open source project that allows you to play many classic retro games on modern systems, often with a bunch of enhancements. The news is doubly interesting in this case, as Penumbra Overture was open sourced all the way back in 2010. On August 29th, the ScummVM team put up a short announcement noting that with the next stable release, Penumbra Overture will have "full support".

You can test it right now with the daily build, or wait for the next big ScummVM release.

Pictured - Penumbra Overture on Linux

From the looks of the ScummVM source code on GitHub, they are using a fork of the open source HPL1 game engine from Frictional. Hopefully at some point later we'll also see support for the later games Penumbra: Black Plague and Penumbra: Requiem.

The ScummVM team also recently announced support for World Builder-based games.

Penumbra Overture | Release Date: 30th March 2007

Official links:

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Native Linux, Horror, Indie Game, Open Source, Retro, Survival | Apps: Penumbra Overture

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky [External Link].
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3 comments

Linas 3 hours ago

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Supporter Plus

That is an unexpected addition to ScummVM. I was under the impression that they focus on classic 2D point-and-click games, because they share the same(-ish) game engine. But Penumbra is a relatively modern 3D game with a custom engine that has nothing in common with the rest of ScummVM. What benefit is embedding HPL1 engine into ScummVM instead of it being stand-alone?

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buckysrevenge 2 hours ago

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I'd love to see the sequels become playable in ScummVM, there's a game stopping bug on the windows version of The Black Plague on Steam that causes the player to freeze in place in a certain scene and iirc the Linux version doesn't work well at all anymore

Edit- forgot to mention which game had the bug

Last edited by buckysrevenge on 1 Sep 2025 at 3:11 pm UTC

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grigi 2 hours ago

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I'm also very much surprised by the addition of a 3D game. I know there was some work to try and administratively merge the 2D and 3D work, but haven't heard much of it in recent times. Awesome!

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