I don't want to be unfair to this game, but it is short and its gameplay mechanics are narrow. It gets repetetive eventually, bland and boring to the degree that once I learned that there are multiple endings I wasn't interested in discovering them. You might as well buy and play a AAA horror title instead, i get The Evil Within vibes from this one. The artstyle is commendable, just like other horror themed indietitles, but it is not enough to make up for the lack of playability, and replayability. LIMBO is a similar game, but it pulls everything off in a small and tasty package, unlike NeN which chugs along and overstays its welcome.
It is a very rewarding and challenging experience with a story that get's the job done. I originally compared it a lot to Age of Empires 1 & 2 but that's pretty wrong to do. You might wonder, what is the cake with Stronghold? What's so fun about it? Challenge, Reward and Victory! This game can spell those words so clear you'll whisper them like a mantra. A game of stronghold starts with you placing your primary fortress somewhere on the gamemap, as well as a granary and a stockpile. The granary and the stockpile are the core elements to strongholds gameplay. You'll play as the Lord of the castle and have direct control over everything, except the people. In stronghold, unlike Age of empires you don't have to have a builder to build things. There are no delays with building and training units either. To do anything, you have to keep your peasants/villagers "satisfied" which means they either like you a lot and are very lazy, or they fear you a lot and work very hard. To appease your peasants, you provide them food. You decide how much, because otherwise it will run out before it get's refilled. There's also taxes which you can guess how they affect the peasants. There is a level in the campaign which is largely unbeatable on the highest difficulty because of a bug, but if you play on the normal or easier difficulties you'll beat the game easily. No worries! The controls for controlling soldiers are a bit quirky because you assign all orders to them with a leftmouse click, unlike AoE where you use the rightmouse button. It's the other way around because rightclick deselects them, which would be the opposite in AoE. Funny! Peasants have annoying AI and might block you when you build things sometimes. I played this on the original disc release initially, but if you want to buy it go with the HD editions available since you can't play over 1024x768 otherwise. The HD editions support up to at least 2560x1440.
I you have played Amnesia or Soma you might think that Penumbra is a bit dated in terms of graphics and gameplay. It's story is unique though and the setting reminds me of The Thing, but it's very different because only that The Thing takes place on Arctica and Penumbra on Greenland is the only common denominator. Penumbra is a vastly scarier experience because you play a lonely character, Philip, who is looking for his father whom he never met. Penumbra is originally an experience split into three pieces, Overture, Black Plague and Requiem. Overture is a suspenceful mystery in a dark place with occasional puzzles, an interesting story and a few modest scares. No jumpscares here! Black Plague steps it up a few notches by being A LOT scarier, there are a few segments where you'll be doing a bit of running akin to how a game of Amnesia the Dark Descent usually goes. Requiem is a puzzlegame that concludes the previous titles and brings a bit of closure to the first two installments. Requiem isn't a scary game as far as I can remember and the reason might be that Black Plague did too much to scare the player and progressed the story so much that Frictional would have to invent a few more things to top Black Plague. Requiem is worth a playthrough if you want to know what happens after Black Plague. On the whole, Overture is a more original title (except it's the only one where you can use items as weapons). Black Plague is scarier because of the introduction of certain enemies and the removal of any weapons or items that could be used as such. Requiem is a storydriven puzzlegame, not much of a horror game honestly.
