The newest game from the developer of Umurangi Generation casts players as a penguin caught up in something far bigger than itself. ORIGAME DIGITAL and indie label Fellow Traveller have launched Penguin Colony, a cosmic horror game set in Antarctica, on PC via Steam, the GOG store and Humble Store.
The game takes place in 1939, as two rival expeditions push deeper into the frozen continent towards something ancient that is best left undisturbed. A Nazi expedition is searching for an ancient power it believes will prove its own superiority, while a Kaitiaki expedition is trying to stop them and return whatever lies beneath the ice to its slumber.
The player has no stake in either side. As one of many penguins from the local colony, curiosity is the only reason to follow the humans as they bring their ambitions, ideologies and conflicts to Antarctica.
Players waddle, swim and slide across the ice as different species of penguin, each with its own abilities and limitations. They can squeeze through tiny gaps and listen in on conversations, uncovering environmental details and increasingly strange evidence of what is unfolding around them. The penguins are witnesses rather than participants, and an Insight system changes what they are able to perceive. Unusual imagery, hidden discoveries and environmental storytelling leave players to decide for themselves what they have seen.
The game draws on H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, John Carpenter’s The Thing, the work of David Lynch and experimental horror games from the PlayStation 2 era. It also proclaims to lean into ambiguity and vulnerability, and the sense that some things are too large and too ancient to understand. While Penguin Colony borrows heavily from weird fiction, it also seeks to question the assumptions behind the genre, exploring colonialism, human ideologies and the unsettling idea that humanity was never especially important.
