Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I’ve played. It’s the best because it places Lovecraft’s universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown’s narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of “queer creatures” and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of “scientific explanations” and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp.
Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word “sex”. I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk. Then I flop on my belly and slither out of camp, chasing the whistling wires of the wind. For I am a penguin. These creatures, their flags, their words and their elder gods mean little to me. I might accidentally witness their hubris and self-deception and savage talk of racial hierarchies and destiny, but I am not some befuddled Miskatonic bookworm consumed by sweaty urges toward worlds beyond ken. I am a penguin. I just happened to be hopping through here while all this weird shit was going on.
All told, the penguins of Penguin Colony are a winningly silly source of critical distance from the carnival-mirror imperialism of, in this case, At The Mountains Of Madness, a Lovecraft novella that usefully features a bunch of monster penguins. Created by Umurangi Generation devs Origame Digital, an Indigenous team working in Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung land, Penguin Colony retains the novella’s broad arc of explorers from the global north venturing into a frozen eldritch necropolis, but otherwise gives the story a kicking.
In this adaptation, set a few years after Lovecraft’s death, the explorers have become German Nazi occultists with a few English collaborators, including Brown’s temporally adrift narrator. Rather than the impossible architecture of Lovecraft’s stories, later areas resemble dessicated modern cities built on stolen land. The game also introduces a redemption narrative in the shape of a group of Māori warriors, who are briefly controllable between chapters. The Māori group are questing to stop the dafty fascists from waking a dormant starspawn, which they have somehow misidentified as the “one true Aryan king”. Again, though, none of that’s your problem. You’re a goddamn penguin.
There are several playable penguin varieties in Penguin Colony, and you can switch between them freely by walking up to one and hitting Y button. Should you accidentally flop into a crevasse or a puddle of wormy Shoggoth juices, the world is full of back-up birds, dozing on bergs or in caverns. There are rudiments of a class system, which factors into optional terrain puzzles: some penguins are heavy enough to press floor switches, while baby penguins can’t swim but are able to fit through tunnels, revealing new areas or shortcuts.
While the game recreates the calls of different species, I’m not sure Penguin Colony does much justice to the inner life of penguins. They’re just a fun, disposable dramatic device, riffing on Pingu and Happy Feet as much as they do the six-foot dreadsquawkers of Lovecraft’s story. I’m also not sure Penguin Colony is the best penguin platformer I’ve played, which isn’t exactly a huge tent, because penguins, bless ’em, are not obvious ground-based acrobats. The penguins in Penguin Colony are, to be frank, janky as hell. They boop and stutter up inclines, often allowing you to ‘cheat’ the geography. They ‘slide’ like their bottoms are misfiring turbojets. In general, the game’s presentation is a bit of a penguin right now. Tutorial tips reappear erratically, and there’s a stamina circle that takes up far too much of the screen.
The penguins are overall performant in getting you from A to B, but this ain’t sand-surfing in Journey. Still, one benefit of being a janky-ass penguin is that you often have to move quite ponderously, which enforces a lengthier appreciation of the game’s environments – especially, the bleeding helix catacombs and blue-glared “downtown” areas of later chapters. There’s some terrific scenery in Penguin Colony, beyond the opening dreary ice sheet: one enormous ruin houses a lumpy, rippled structure that could be either a brain coral or a god’s petrified brain, defying both comprehension and articulation in the maze-folded contours of its squamous and primordial immensity. Or as my penguin at the time put it: HOOONK.
While I was expecting Penguin Colony to put the boot into settlers and Lovecraft, after trying the demo, I was startled to find that on some level, it’s a Soulslike. Or maybe an anti-Soulslike. Later on, there’s a “boss battle” featuring a giant, jerky Shoggowotsit that pays open homage to FromSoftware, complete with harrowing orchestral score and AOE gravity attacks. It’s like somebody tried to rebuild the Gaping Dragon out of mops and pieces of accordion. Being a penguin, I merely flopped on my belly once again and scooched through the horror’s ankles, onto the next region. I have done likewise with many Souls enemies, unless restrained by fog gates. Is there a Penguin Knight in Dark Souls? There should be.
In the wake of that encounter, I thought anew about all the non-penguin life I’d met during my four-hour Penguin Colony playthrough – all the near-dead fascists in foetal positions or kneeling before idols, their bodies mutilated, bleating in despair. You see hollow folk like that all over Lordran, the difference here being that as one in a million local penguins, I am not perceived as an intruder. No corner ambushes for me. The same likely isn’t true of the Māori characters, who are essentially playing a ‘real’ Soulslike behind the scenes, navigating a more hostile incarnation of the same world.
The giant, jerky Shoggowotsit also features in one of the Māori adventurer sequences. The game dangles the carrot of a ‘proper’ bossfight, here, but fades mockingly to white when you take the first swing. Hence, ‘anti-Soulslike’: Penguin Colony invokes certain genre expectations in order to frustrate them. Or perhaps, to redirect them.
In lieu of combat, the FromSofty parallels appear most strongly in the torturous, Blighttown-worthy route design, and especially, the framing of pick-ups. There are collectible glowballs that bestow not gear and XP, but English and Te reo Māori words that often chime with or invite commentary on their surroundings – a really intriguing revising of the poetic distribution of item lore in Dark Souls. There are also photographs, taken by a Nazi propagandist, that self-combust to release snatches of flashback dialogue.
After the credits roll, you’re shown a Zodiac constellation of all the lore you’ve found, a web of secrets and lies the devs offer in-game as a basis for recapturing “pre-social media secret finding and community storytelling”. It’s an incentive to replay, though Origame Digital’s Tali Faulkner has elsewhere commented that the team would rather people don’t try to 100% the lore – it’s more about swapping notes with other players, like doom-sodden Miskatonic boffins trying to work out which bit of Cthulhu goes where.
Origame Digital plan to make more Lovecraftian games – they do, indeed, have their sights on Cthulhu, having begun their adventure with a Lovecraft story that is simultaneously well-known and less-explored, by virtue of starring a different faction of cosmic deities. I hope they also continue their experiments with Soulslike design, because aside from putting the H.P. in Penguin, their latest game has shed a strange new light on a genre I thought I knew all too well.