The works of H.P. Lovecraft have been influential for many games, including the recent Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, but when you think of the author's cosmic horrors, you probably wouldn't naturally think of penguins. But that's what Penguin Colony does as an unusual adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountain of Madness about a disastrous expedition in Antarctica, from the perspective of the South Pole's indigenous flightless birds.
I actually got to play Penguin Colony a few months ago at BitSummit where I also got to meet game director Tali Faulkner at Melbourne-based indie studio Origame Digital, which previously made the award-winning Umurangi Generation. While there's a considerable leap in scope and ambition between the two games, that distinct lo-fi 3D aesthetic that harkens back to early console generations is still very much there. But where Umurangi Generation was described as a dystopian Jet Set Radio, Faulkner describes Penguin Colony as "a souped up PS2 game. Kind of like if you were making a PS2 game and had the power of a PS3."
There were also reasons that making a game set in the Antarctic was a better choice for the team's next project after it had to pivot away from another idea that was going to be more of a systems-driven detective game.
"Partly due to the current games crash, there's not a lot of money going around or people taking risky ideas, so how can we make a smaller game on a cheaper budget and rein in the scope?" Faulkner says. "Well, the Antarctic is just ice, right?"
Penguin Colony's large level design
That the environments can be just simple ice textures means that Penguin Colony can actually afford to have quite large levels. "It's not Death Stranding scale, but it's like a linear open world, and the idea is that each level is sort of a small open world," he clarifies. Another important thing was to make this open world fun to traverse, a response to the team's own critique that Umurangi Generation had pretty janky controls. So even though waddling penguins are not the type of species you would expect to have terrific mobility, they do feel good to control.
And you're not just controlling one penguin. There are different species of penguin available, which the team had just researched and modelled based off photos on Wikipedia, from the common Adélie penguin to the towering Emperor penguin. Get close to one and there's a prompt allowing the player to sort of leap from control of one to the other, which you'll want to do as each have their own distinct abilities, like the emperor being able to slide around at a higher speed to compensate for its slower walking speed, or the rockhopper who can traverse steep terrain.
Faulkner finds it especially fun to design an open worldish game that's also not human-centred. "If this was a game where you were a human character, you would essentially just be walking through the snow with a gun, and we want to sort of give something that's just a bit different," he explains. "This game gives you the fantasy of playing as a penguin who can slide and hop, and swim. With that water, we wanted to make it feel like an alien world underneath, and also if it was a human game, you probably wouldn't be able to go in the water."
But as I play the demo's opening, switching between penguins as I traverse the Antarctic, it all leads up to the cosmic horrors originally hinted at. Through their perspective, you observe a larger story involving two rival human groups that have come to your home in search of a mysterious eldritch god. While one of these groups are the Maori Kaitiaki, the other faction turn out to be the Nazis, itself a significant reason why this adaptation happens to be set in 1939, a few years after Lovecraft had already died.
It's not just a bold creative choice to confront Lovecraft's racism that's also reflected in his fiction but also makes it comparable to the depiction of Nazis also hunting for ancient artefacts in Indiana Jones films.
"The idea is this expedition believes that the thing that has been calling people to the Southern Hemisphere isn't a Lovecraft abomination, but it's an Aryan god," Faulkner explains. "The Nazis are sort of there to myth-make around that. Because we know from history and also films like Indiana Jones, the relic hunting missions that the Nazis went on were purely propagandistic and they were to rewrite history, such as prove that Jesus wasn't Jewish. One of the things we explore in the story is this idea of myth-making, what the Cthulhu mythos is, and it's sort of fun to play with the idea that these guys are just archeologists who don't understand their place in history."
Penguin Colony is coming to PC and Switch 2 in 2026, and a demo is playable on Steam.
