I wanna talk about Penguin Colony. Let’s talk about Penguin Colony. It’s the new game demo from Origame Digital (Umurangi Generation) and Fellow Traveller (1000xResist, etc.) and it’s a Lovecraftian tale reimagined, where you are a penguin waddling through the Antarctic wastes (your home) as you watch people who are not from Antarctica—nazis, namely—lose it and freeze to death (if they’re lucky) as they come down with a classic bout of Cosmic Horror. As a penguin—pick a penguin, any penguin—you can of course waddle, hop, slide across the snow and ice on your belly and swim. When you hop, you make a little “boit” sound that I fell in love with almost immediately.
Penguin Colony features the voice acting talents of Lenval Brown (Disco Elysium) and German musician leWel, and while they mostly seem to exist (for now, in the demo) as disembodied voices streaming into our penguin’s consciousness, the story they are telling together will sound more than a little familiar to readers of At The Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft’s classic eldritch tale. However, there’s more going on here as the trailers seem to indicate and as you can discover if you really take your time and explore the frozen environment.
As you waddle, hop and slide your way around, you will encounter areas and scenarios where the penguin you are piloting (for lack of a better term) is ill-suited for forward progress. For example, baby penguins of any type can fit under small gaps in the chain-link fences that border some areas of the map, but they should not under any circumstances be led into the water. Alternately, you might need a bigger penguin, like an Emperor or an Adélie, to hop up to certain areas that smaller penguins couldn’t reach. You can switch between penguins at will and choose the best penguin for whatever task lies in front of you. I love this. I don’t love how some of the movement feels but I am being lenient on Penguin Colony in this regard because genuinely how do I expect fucking penguins to move.
At any rate, slow, deliberate movement is kinda what you want from a game like this because there are Big Secrets hidden among the ice and abandoned research and industrial cabins that dot the landscape. Some of these secrets are imbued in the artifacts left behind by the nazis and various other human factions—photos, objects, even whole tableaus left behind. In the demo, finding these artifacts mostly triggered more narration from Brown, who plays researcher Howard Blakely; I imagine in the full game, as our penguin encounters more stuff from different people, we’ll get different voiceovers; I know in one of the trailers it features a Māori expedition to the ice, and I’m interested to see what happens there.
But what I’m really fascinated with are the tiny glowing dots scattered across the landscape. They contain words, and if you collect enough of them your penguin can understand certain messages delivered at certain times. I think this is where the meat of the game is going to end up being: exploring Antarctica as one of the seven different kinds of Antarctic penguins, finding material culture left behind by humans and uncovering cryptic messages by looking for the words to understand them with. I’m fascinated by this. I’m locked in, ready to go.
I’ve been following Naphtali Faulkner for a long time, since Umurangi Gen came out at least, and I have seen the various prototypes he’s put together of games over the years. What Origame Digital have landed on with Penguin Colony is so fuckin cool and so different from what they did before that I kind of had the feeling I was gonna be sold on it before I ever played the demo. But now that I have? Let me in. I’m so ready. I’ve been feeling this strange pull to jump back in and return to the huddled penguin masses in order to slide my way to new eldritch discoveries.
Penguin Colony’s demo is available to play during Steam Next Fest.
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