Penguin Colony review: A daringly weird horror game whose atmosphere and surprises overcome its rough edges

Penguin Colony is a work of cosmic horror that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in scares from the beyond, even though its unique penguin platforming can be frustrating to wrangle. It's a radical recontextualization of an H.P. Lovecraft classic with a clear affection for the writer's storytelling, but also scathing contempt for his racism.

For my money, it's not October without a weird-ass new indie horror game leaving a lasting impression on me, and Penguin Colony has satisfied my annual craving. You are a penguin witnessing the events of the Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness. Your powers are honk, slide, swim, and hop.

Rather than being limited to a specific bird, you are able to possess any penguin you come across, theoretically using different species' abilities to tackle different movement challenges. Aside from using little baby penguins to squeeze into tight spaces, I was almost exclusively a Rockhopper main: Their impressive vertical jump was a boon in many areas. They shoulda hooped instead of investigating The Strange.

The GOAT, PC Gamer Tales from The Hard Drive host Lenval Brown, narrates the adventure from the perspective of a customarily neurotic and verbose Lovecraft protagonist. Brown's delivery lends everything a similar emotional weight to his iconic performance in Disco Elysium, and he makes for a comforting, familiar presence⁠ even as things go all nasty crazy style.

Waddle on

I remain conflicted over Penguin Colony's movement and mechanics: I didn't find them especially fun, they got in the way, but that also felt weirdly appropriate. As a penguin, waddling around is kinda shitty and sluggish, particularly as the levels shift away from their native habitat.

Most charitably, there's a Foddian (Getting Over It, Baby Steps) quality to the mechanical exploration. It got me to really lean in for some tricky traversal as the atmosphere reached its most suffocating and intense in the caves and structures deep under the arctic ice⁠. I felt frustrated and restless as Penguin Colony's coolest levels opened up before me, held back as I was by this little penguin body. But that dovetails quite well with Penguin Colony's whole premise: that you are an inhuman observer of a human (and something else) story.

A more clear-cut negative was an inconsistency with a mantling (do penguins mantle?) feature (was this intentional?) that felt more like a clipping glitch, letting me clear some ledges but not others. Penguin Colony's appropriately minimalist UI has one glaring exception: A Shadow of the Colossus-style circular stamina meter that appears only when your stamina is depleting. It is distractingly massive and neon-colored, and it usually wasn't clear what the relationship was between what I was doing and the stamina bar's drain. It had a mind of its own, and was never a welcome sight during my playtime.

At its best, though, the penguin parkour contributed to this feeling that I was a small, insignificant thing skirting the edges of a drama I only partially understood. We as humankind are effectively unknowable elder gods to the rest of the animal kingdom, and Penguin Colony largely succeeded in evoking a one-of-a-kind sense of dual-layer cosmic horror through its mechanics.

Side stories

None of what follows is an explicit "Vader is Luke's da" spoiler, but this is definitely a game that thrives on surprise and interpretation. If you are already convinced you'd like to play, please leave the browser tab open⁠—ideally on multiple devices and refreshing regularly⁠—until you've completed Penguin Colony. Then come back and finish reading.

Penguin Colony is not a 1:1 retelling of At the Mountains of Madness. Lenval Brown voices a new character named Howard Blakely⁠—as opposed to the original story's William Dyer⁠—and the passages he narrates are a pitch-perfect imitation of Lovecraft's distinctive prose.

Each level ends with a brief interlude where you control members of a party of Māori warriors who inherited a tradition of fighting and containing the evil at the south of the world. Blakely is a sympathetic American working with an expedition of Nazis, specifically their famous division devoted to finding The Ark of the Covenant, Thor's Hammer, the Easter Bunny, etc. The warriors are on a quest to stop the Nazis and suppress the outer evil they inadvertently awakened.

The war party interludes gradually built up the feeling that I was getting dispatches from another, "better" game. And I love that: I don't think I've ever played a game like Penguin Colony before, one where it feels like the full story is happening in another room, and I only get a keyhole view of what's really going on.

You get out what you put into this cryptic mystery: It's suffused with unique, cursive hieroglyphs, and I eventually realized that they're a replacement cipher for the alphabet. It pays to play with a notebook and pen nearby⁠—cracking this code was a rewarding little side activity that added to my understanding of the deeper plot.

The back half of Penguin Colony takes place among the twisting megastructures of an alien city under the ice, and Origame Digital manages to evoke an incredible sense of scale and ancient, terrible purpose with these levels: They reminded me of 2022's criminally underrated Scorn, as well as the stunning Ash Lake in Dark Souls' deepest depths. You don't fully understand what you're looking at, but you get that it is of a staggering profundity.

Case of the vapours

I notice a tendency in cosmic horror writing to shy away from the more unseemly aspects of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy, this instinct to say "Thank you for the outer horrors and cyclopean ruins, H.P., I'm going to tactfully gloss over what you named your cat, as well as your assorted thoughts on untermenschen, as though you are my least favorite uncle cornering me at a family gathering."

Penguin Colony proverbially says "fuck it, we ball" in this regard, making Lovecraft's racial fixations a very real, very impactful part of the horror. Blakely is an "enlightened" man of modernity who gets along just peachy with his expedition mates from the Third Reich. He is the neurotic, asylum-bound Lovecraft protagonist at his most cowardly, self-indulgent, and contemptible, and very much feels like a stand-in for old Howard Phillips himself.

The Māori warriors are everything Blakely is not, with minimal dialogue compared to Blakely's voluminous narration. Their laconic characterization is instead delivered through their actions and fellowship with each other. Their camaraderie stands in contrast with Blakely's solipsistic navel-gazing. They are proactive, and oppose the influence of outer beings rather than waiting to be changed by them. They are motivated to protect others, even to the point of self-sacrifice, in contrast with Blakely's vulgar, "scientific" curiosity or the Nazis' brutal nationalism.

It rules that this is all roiling just under the surface of Penguin Colony. It invites you to draw your own conclusions about what you're witnessing, rather than didactically explaining a point of view. The only times it indulges in explicit political messaging are with a land acknowledgement and content warning at the beginning of the game, then a blistering indictment of the industry's inaction regarding the genocide of Palestinians by Israel after the credits. I found these direct addresses of the player to be all the more impactful paired with Penguin Colony's otherwise cryptic delivery.

Even with its rough edges, I love Penguin Colony: It's a rich, multilayered piece of interactive storytelling in an impressively compact package. It's a unique exploration of cosmic horror, one that rebels against genre grandaddy H.P. Lovecraft's signature 19th century freak boy racism with a tale of indigenous revenge. One you observe through the eyes of a penguin.