About two dozen deaths later it strikes me: oh, right, because Penumbra had one of the most aggravating, convoluted excuses for a combat system I've ever encountered in the hundreds of games I've played in my life! And I've played Arcanum!
You have three hit points. You get a melee weapon. To attack you need to hold down LMB then swipe across the screen in the direction you want to attack. It occasionally fails to register your swipes correctly. It over-rides your mouse movement meaning you can't turn while attacking... unless you also hold down RMB at the same time... which prevents you from attacking... all of which might not be so aggravating if the main enemies in the game, those zombie dogs (zombogs? dombies?) didn't attack by lunging at you and landing behind you. Hit detection fails half the time if your target is moving, which again might not be so bad since a solid hit usually knocks your enemy down. Except... if you do manage to land a hit you need to wait for your target to get back up again because, much as being unable to look down in Arena, you can't seem to land your hits vertically no matter what the visuals say. So you need to allow your enemy to get back up, which might give you a chance at another hit... or it might run away faster than you can chase and call more dogs to help it.
Even when you're not hitting monsters the system fails miserably. In one sequence you have to break down stone walls while being chased by spiders. Holding down LMB and swiping repeatedly seems the way to go... except the system will sometimes interpret your swiping back and forth as wanting to change direction and not swing at all... so you'll have to un-click and click again. Yes, they managed to make repetitive hammering more complicated than it actually is in real life!
Oh, and did I mention you can't open doors while holding an item?
And ok, technically you can also sneak past enemies' backs while they patrol, and even bait the zombogs away by throwing beef jerky. I've killed one so far and snuck past the rest. You can also kill them by baiting them into explosives, but given their ludicrous speed, your own sloth-like alacrity and the unbearable clunkiness of the whole system, that goes about as well as expected. Combat is obviously meant to play a significant part in your playthrough, all the more annoying because Overture would actually have made for perfectly enjoyable survival horror without its First-Person-Slasher element. It's got some nifty little box-stacking environment interaction puzzles, the usual item gathering and sequential assembly you'd find in any adventure games, even an example of Morse code decoding short and slow enough not to get obnoxious (and you're provided with a key in-game, unlike say in TSW) and the whole Gothic horror angle's played rather well, including some surprisingly decent voice acting for such a low-budget title.
To me, what makes the combat system's "what the hell were you thinking!?!" stupidity especially jarring is Overture's supposed release in 2007, two or three years after Mount&Blade had gone into open beta banking on its bar-setting, physics-enabled FPSlasher combat including directional attacks. Not to mention Rune was seven years old, or that Oblivion had come out just a year prior. Overture was not a pioneering attempt at new mechanics. It could have followed many other, better examples of varying complexity for melee FPS combat. How did it seem like a good idea to wreck Half-Life's crowbar a decade after the fact?
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