Penguin Colony Rips Lovecraft’s Horror From His Racist Hands

Penguin Colony wants you to writhe. What begins as a novel adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness told from the perspective of waddling penguins evolves into a confrontational work of protest art built for an era of incalculable violence. In its cosmic doom spiral, Origame Digital lashes out at artistic cowardice, reclaims Lovecraftian horror from its disgraced author, and shouts out a rallying cry for anyone who has grown complacent living in a nightmare. Maybe it’s not too late to wake up.

For the bulk of Penguin Colony’s three-hour runtime, it's perhaps a little too easy to write it off as a lo-fi gag game riding a wacky elevator pitch. Set in Antarctica circa 1939, the story serves as a reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s 1936 novella about an icy expedition that ends in a confrontation with celestial monsters. Howard Blakely, an omnipresent narrator voiced by Disco Elysium’s Lenval Brown, walks you through an altered retelling of At The Mountains of Madness, mixed with a few other Lovecraft stories. It still namechecks familiar elements like Miskatonic University and Shoggoths, but it’s immediately clear that Origame is taking some radical artistic liberties with the source material.

In Penguin Colony’s version of the tale, there are two competing forces following an alluring call to Antarctica. One of them is a mysterious tribe who we only see in short interstitial flashes between chapters. Their motives aren’t clear at first, but those of their rivals are: The Third Reich has caught wind of whatever is happening down south and has deployed a Nazi expedition to uncover the truth first, believing that they’ve found an Aryan God. The unexpected turn injects newfound mystery and terror into a tale that’s been referenced to death over 90 years.

It’s also a cathartic retelling for anyone familiar with Lovecraft himself. Today, the late author is remembered for his outwardly ethnocentric worldview that’s difficult to extricate from his writing. Lovecraft wasn’t shy about voicing his belief, for instance, that Black people can not mix into a “civilized caucasian nation.” Those thoughts bleed into stories like The Call of Cthullu, where Lovecraft describes a cult of “mixed blood” God worshippers as “foreign mongrels” who practice voodooism. The more you read Lovecraft’s personal correspondences and outwardly racist poetry, the more you can see his beliefs in his stories.

Many Lovecraft adaptations try to dance around that uncomfortable truth by ignoring any racist themes altogether and sticking to the iconic imagery. But without any newfound thematic intent to fill the gap, we’re often left with shallow cosmic horror stories that don’t give much thought to what the monsters represent. That’s not the case in Penguin Colony. Rather than crying “death of the author,” Origame Digital pries Lovecraft’s work out of his cold hands and weaponizes it against his own beliefs.

It doesn’t take a lot of mental rewriting to accomplish that. Penguin Colony sees an inherent colonization narrative in the text of At The Mountains of Madness and follows that thread to a logical conclusion, Lovecraft’s contrary beliefs be damned. A straight line connects civilization-devouring monsters and the real history of European colonizers who left death and destruction in their wake. Its real horrors are the Nazis, and the people too hypnotized by hollow promises of wealth and power to stand against their vicious campaign.

You’ll only catch all of that in passing, of course. You’re just a penguin.

Initially, the most impenetrable part of Penguin Colony is the fact that you’re controlling a lowly bird, cruising through a warzone of intergalactic proportions. It’s a waddling simulator that takes clear cues from Death Stranding: Your goal is simply to make your way across Antarctica by swimming, belly sliding, and weakly hopping up craggy terrain to carve a path towards the light that beckons you in the distance. All the while, you occasionally pick up photographs that tease a fragmented story, and orbs that contain cryptic words. It seems like Origame Digital is playing it all for laughs at first. There’s a comic absurdity to the fact that you’re squawking around without a care in the world as a narrator whispers a grim tale into the icy wind.

It’s still unnerving even in those moments, mind you. Penguin Colony’s low-polygon visuals depict Antarctica as a dark, desolate expanse made up of jagged ice and grimy textures. The closer you get to the light, the more you find yourself tiptoeing over fallen ruins of unknown origin or passing by horrific sights that are hard to fully decode thanks to the obscuring power of lo-fi visuals. It’s as otherworldly as Lovecraft’s work typically is, but it accomplishes that by running PlayStation 2 aesthetics through a meat grinder.

Before Penguin Colony fully plays its hand, it invites some low-hanging game design critique while your mind is still wandering. There’s a traversal puzzle element where you’re able to swap to different penguin breeds that have different strengths (Rockhoppers can climb terrain more efficiently, Emperors slide faster), but the idea is too sparsely developed to force you to swap penguins thoughtfully. It’s a buggy game too, with penguins often clipping through icy walls or getting stuck on geometry.

To hyperfocus on those details is to lose sight of the actual question you should be asking: why penguins? If you struggle to find that answer in the cryptic game itself, look to Origame Digital founder Naphtali Faulkner for guidance. Faulkner, a Māori game developer, has not been shy about framing Penguin Colony as an indigenous story in the lead up to its release. In a recent interview with New Zealand publication GamesNight, Faulkner explained where the birds fit into a story of Nazis and eldritch horrors.

“Indigenous means the original inhabitants under the context of colonisation. Not just the people, but the animals too,” Faulkner told GamesNight. “When we look at Antarctica we are often told that it is no man’s land. However, if you don’t view yourself as any different from the animals of the world, and merely another animal that belongs to place, you begin to see the world very differently.... You begin to see how every European colonial power annexes parts of Antarctica despite very little use for it.”

That insight should be enough to convince you that Penguin Colony isn’t an ironic gag; it’s a sincere effort to retell a horror story from the perspective of Antarctica’s inhabitants. What seems silly at a glance transforms into something sickening, as your march through a once-quiet penguin habitat leads you into rows of Nazi tents. They are portrayed like an invasive species, just the same as the colonizing monsters who have left behind pools of corrosive goo.

The closer you get to the end, the more explicit Origame Digital is about Penguin Colony’s message and why it’s making it in 2026. In a fourth-wall shattering moment, a series of title cards call out Israel’s war on Gaza and criticizes video game creators for refusing to meet the crisis with the outspoken art it begs for. Penguin Colony urges its players to approach present-day travesty with the same full-throated disgust that they do distant history. It practically begs us not to wait 80 years to call out horrors we can see today, leaving future generations to forever puzzle over how no one stood up to stop a clear injustice.

I’m not sure that it even believes there will still be a habitable future left in 80 years if humanity continues to bury its head in the snow. Penguin Colony is apocalypse art perched at the end of the world. It’s an attempt to claw back any patch of cultural ground it can before it is swallowed whole. That starts with reclaiming Lovecraft’s writing in the name of anti-colonial protest. Good start. Now, what’s next?