The night I played through Penguin Colony, a surreal new psychological horror game from Umurangi Generation developer Origame Digital, I struggled to fall asleep. It wasn’t the thought of slimy Lovecraftian beasts that kept me up, but a more tangible horror. Images of history’s darkest travesties — war, occupation, genocide — flashed through my head.
For a moment, I swear I could see the end of the world: powerful monsters devouring cultures one by one until only tundra remained. Penguin Colony wants you to writhe. What begins as a novel adaptation of H.P.
Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness told from the perspective of waddling penguins evolves into a confrontational work of protest art built for an era of incalculable violence. In its cosmic doom spiral, Origame Digital lashes out at artistic cowardice, reclaims Lovecraftian horror from its disgraced author, and shouts out a rallying cry for anyone who has grown complacent living in a nightmare. Maybe it’s not too late to wake up.
For the bulk of Penguin Colony’s three-hour runtime, it's perhaps a little too easy to write it off as a lo-fi gag game riding a wacky elevator pitch. Set in Antarctica circa 1939, the story serves as a reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s 1936 novella about an icy expedition that ends in a confrontation with celestial monsters. Howard Blakely, an omnipresent narrator voiced by Disco Elysium’s Lenval Brown, walks you through an altered retelling of At The Mountains of Madness, mixed with a few other Lovecraft stories.
It still namechecks familiar elements like Miskatonic University and Shoggoths, but it’s immediately clear that Origame is taking some radical artistic liberties with the source material. In Penguin Colony’s version of the tale, there are two competing forces following an alluring call to Antarctica. One of them is a mysterious tribe who we only see in short interstitial flashes between chapters.
Their motives aren’t clear at first, but those of their rivals are: The Third Reich has caught wind of whatever is happening down south and has deployed a Nazi expedition to uncover the truth first, believing that they’ve found an Aryan God. The unexpected turn injects newfound mystery and terror into a tale that’s been referenced to death over 90 years. It’s also a cathartic retelling for anyone familiar with Lovecraft himself.
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