H.P. Lovecraft’s influence on horror is difficult to separate from the racism, colonial thinking and pseudoscientific ideas embedded in his work. Penguin Colony, the new game from Umurangi Generation creator Naphtali Faulkner, confronts that legacy rather than treating it as harmless decoration. Its answer to cosmic horror is unexpectedly charming: hundreds of penguins.
In Penguin Colony, you control Antarctic birds in remarkable numbers. Emperor penguins, chicks, rockhoppers and chinstraps each bring different abilities, including speed, swimming and jumping. By pressing against another penguin, you can transfer your essence and take control of it instantly. A photo mode and simple movement options make sliding across the ice appealing even before the story turns strange.
That quiet Antarctic routine does not last. Faulkner’s game reworks Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness through an alternative-history premise: Nazi researchers, rather than wealthy New England explorers, break through the ice while searching for an ancient god. They hope the being will confirm their claims of racial purity. Instead, the entity’s appearance contradicts their ideology, and the expedition releases an amorphous, mind-destroying terror.
The penguins are caught in the middle. They waddle into underground tombs, explore impossible spaces and peck at fragments of forbidden knowledge while the human expedition collapses around them. The contrast is deliberate: creatures perfectly adapted to the environment observe the consequences of human arrogance.
Turning Lovecraft’s explorers against themselves
Nazi villains are familiar territory for Lovecraft-inspired satire, but Penguin Colony takes aim at something more fundamental than the setting. It uses the genre’s own fascination with scholarship, discovery and forbidden knowledge to expose the foolishness of its investigators.
Lovecraft’s academics and explorers repeatedly push reality towards catastrophe because they believe curiosity gives them the right to understand everything. Here, that conceit is interrupted by brief appearances from Indigenous caretakers who have spent generations dealing with the damage caused by self-important outsiders. These interludes intentionally feel as though they belong to another game, sometimes switching perspective with the abruptness of changing inputs during an active Nightreign session.
The tone can move from pointed criticism to absurd comedy in seconds. Penguins make a tiny anime-like sound when they jump, while the human antagonists endure graphic and grotesque body horror. The game’s humour does not erase its ideas; it gives the player room to process them without turning every moment into a lecture.
A bleak world made playful
The setting is expansive, dark and constantly unsettled. Hidden sights and secrets encourage careful exploration, and some platforming challenges require you to guide particular penguin types into position. The levels are designed around the creatures’ quirks. Rockhoppers, for example, appear to have almost magnetic feet.
That flexibility also produces occasional rough edges. There are moments when a penguin can become trapped in a narrow gap, creating a mundane form of frustration inside an otherwise eldritch adventure. It is the sort of jank that sits alongside the game’s charm rather than completely undermining it.
Lenval Brown provides the narration, bringing the warm, polished delivery familiar from Disco Elysium. Against that voice, the Antarctic landscape feels even more vast and threatening. The player is not a heroic exterminator or an action-movie saviour. The penguins can fall into pits or become corrupted by a shoggoth, but the game moves you to another available bird rather than making you watch one suffer.
Faulkner previously explained in a zine interview that he would not make players watch a penguin suffer. That promise is largely upheld. Their huddled poses may resemble ominous ritual, but the birds remain strangely calm while elder gods and human ambition tear the world apart.
Like Umurangi Generation, which cast the player as a photographer witnessing an apocalyptic conflict, Penguin Colony places observation ahead of intervention. You move through impossible architecture to see what happens when arrogant people challenge the structure of reality. For readers who follow unusual game design through the RETROCADE Arcade Blog, it is an especially striking example of a game using a cute premise to deliver serious genre criticism.
Its central joke is simple: the penguins are better suited to this world than the humans who claim to understand it. They may not be able to stop the apocalypse, but they can survive it with more grace than the expedition that caused it. Defying time, space and the limits of knowledge through sheer hubris, it turns out, is not for the birds.
For players considering how unusual PC experiences might fit into a home gaming setup, RETROCADE’s Arcade Machine Buying Guide offers a useful starting point, while the wider arcade machine range covers dedicated cabinets and larger gaming-room options.
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