Penguin Colony review – an Antarctic odyssey of Nazis and Lovecraftian horrors

A Nazi kneels down on frozen snow, staring at an endless Antarctic horizon. Another holds a gun to his head, ready to end his own life. I direct a small waddling penguin up to them, trying to imagine what it could be thinking.

But then a faint smile seems to break out across its beaky face, as if amused by these silly humans and their misguided belief that they could ever best this howling, harsh landscape. For most games, the idea of playing as a penguin observing Nazis losing the plot near the south pole would be weird enough. But Penguin Colony, developed by Origame Digital, pushes further.

This is an audacious, frequently brilliant retelling of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, in which eldritch horrors are just as common as Nazis. Further weirdness abounds: the many collectibles scattered about this place are not shiny gold objects à la Super Mario or Sonic. So tottering about as a semiaquatic bird, you have a unique mission: collect human language.

But let’s zoom out for a moment because playing Penguin Colony is more straightforward than this description suggests. First and foremost, it is a semiopen world exploration game in which you direct a penguin to the same unearthly entity that the Nazis are chasing. You hop, swim and glide about tummy-first, chewing up miles of frozen wasteland like an indefatigable snowboarder.

Tapping a button next to another penguin lets you swap into its body. Some of these, like the rockhopper penguin, are nimble movers, capable of jumping especially high. Fluffy penguin chicks, meanwhile, can squeeze through tiny gaps.

At first, the game’s polar levels are straightforward: snow drifts and ice floes peppered with the remnants of human habitation such as fishing huts. But your surroundings quickly grow stranger: supersized stone labyrinths whose architectural splendour evokes Dark Souls, alien-looking obelisks and abyssal crevasses. Everything in the world is rendered in jagged, low-poly graphics, looming from the screen like a hallucinated PlayStation 2 game.