The Red Pill? The Blue Pill?

Bottle Sprite ripped by A.J. Nitro.  Everything else from some other source.

Believe it or not, The Matrix became an angsty teenager this year, but I digress even before I able to start.  But let's continue.  I actually had to look up which pill was the one that put you back in the Matrix and which was the one that brought you out of it.  There might be some symbolic meaning behind the specific color choices, red=freedom & blue=ignorance, but if there is, I don't know about it.  But lets stay with that blue pill for a while.  Ignorance and not knowing are the reasons for this post today and hold onto that thought.

For the past week or two, I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.  The week of Halloween, Steam was having a sale on a lot of their "scary" and Halloween-esque games so I decided to take advantage and pick up some AAA titles that I never played due to not having the appropriate system (Xbox 360 or a gaming computer).  However, when a game like Left 4 Dead 2 is looking at you with that blank hungry stare and it has a $4.99 sticker on it's forehead, I couldn't pass it up.  I also picked up the Penumbra collection, which consists of the three games in the Penumbra series (Overture, Black Plague, and Requiem).  Wait, you've never heard of Penumbra?  There's the French gothic metal band Penumbra, but we're referring to the game by Frictional Games, the people who brought us Amnesia: The Dark Descent and ~Justine~.  

Never having played any of the games in the Left 4 Dead series, you could look up a trailer and get a gist for what the game is about:

However, if you watch the trailer for Penumbra - Overture: 

You still don't know what the game is about.

With the Left 4 Dead games, you know exactly what you're getting.  I have only a vague idea with Penumbra, and that's something that I really like.  I've played about an hour and-a-half and I still couldn't tell you what the story is aside from what I've experienced.  But don't get me wrong, having a straight forward story that you know about before even starting the game isn't a bad thing and sometimes it's just refreshing to land in a world and go from Point A to Point B and kill as many zombies as you can without dying.  It's also very refreshing to play a game that you know absolutely nothing about.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian