What would you do in the face of impending catastrophe? Few games spoke to their moment like Umurangi Generation did in 2020. A sci-fi apocalypse about taking sick-ass photos as much as it was about capturing the collective angst of successive generations inheriting an increasingly broken world prepared for them like a shit sandwich.
Six years later, designer Tali Faulkner is back with Penguin Colony. An unexpected riff on H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness viewed through the eyes of a penguin, as Faulkner swaps snapping photos for hitting ice ramps. Penguin Colony, like Umurgani, eventually drops the subtext and asks, “Do you not believe your own eyes? What are you—are we—going to do?”
There's a huge difference in the weight of expectations that Penguin Colony bears as opposed to Umurangi Generation. Umurangi Generation took players unawares with its sharp feelings about government failures around COVID-19 and climate change. Penguin Colony starts in a similar place, before escalating accordingly.
“I don't think now's the time for subtlety or nuance,” said Faulkner. “I really don’t.”
It’s best to think of Penguin Colony’s narrative like an onion, with layers that reveal over time. On the surface, you are a smol penguin and your home’s been invaded. Specifically, by Nazis.
“Everyone knows H.P. Lovecraft is a giant racist,” said Faulkner. “What would his protagonists have been during World War II if he was alive? Oh, okay, that answers itself."
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The Nazis are digging for something under the ice. Humorously, you can swap between any penguin you encounter. Some are bigger, some smaller. They’re all penguins. There’s real joy in sliding around the arctic, picking up collectibles that trigger ominous narrations along the way. Like photos in Umurangi Generation, Penguin Colony makes the fantasy of being a penguin fun.
It does not take long for Penguin Colony to begin hinting at menace, but it’s absolutely possible to imagine a scenario where you never meaningfully advanced the story and spend hours surfing the arctic. That’s what my own six-year-old, whose favorite animal is a penguin, did when she saw me playing the game a few weeks ago and gave it a try herself. She giggled loudly as the threw an Emperor penguin off a cliff and into the water. Dismayingly, she did not seem to connect her actions with radical resistance to fascism.
At a recent festival, Faulkner and his team were showing off Penguin Colony and given the Lovecraft of it all, figured they would largely be showing the game to teenagers or young adults.
“No, it was all kids,” said Faulkner. “We had to limit playtime to three to four minutes 'cause it was just a line of children.”
Though Penguin Colony does not have jump scares, there are dead bodies, blood, and countless eldritch horrors. A six-year-old, lack of subtext or not, would have a hard time picking up on the game’s themes, but you can understand the team being cautious. And so, kids would line up to play Penguin Colony one at a time, a humorous circumstance that gestures at a different kind of game the developers at Origame Digital could have made.
“We could have played this game way safer,” said Faulkner. “We could have made it a game about climate change or that is just a game about being penguins. […] If you really don't want to understand it on that level, you can just sort of consume it as Lovecraft from a penguin's perspective. Its most surface layer. Just like with Umurangi, saying it's Jet Set Radio with a camera? You can do that. But it'll probably plant a seed in your head that when you play it five to 10 years from now, you'll go, ‘Oh, that's what it was about? I understand what this is now.’”
These days, Lovecraft is pop culture. Cthulhu is in the latest Minions movie! The influence of Lovecraft is such that you can enjoy Lovecraft’s work while barely having any awareness of the author.
“There's already hundreds of Lovecraft games out there that are just direct adaptations and they're just a snooze fest because you gotta do something new with Lovecraft because new is unknown,” said Faulkner, who also noted Penguin Colony is part of a proposed trilogy of games that would remix and reinterpret various Lovecraft works over time. “Fear of the unknown, that's a famous Lovecraft quote, right? Is the oldest fear of mankind. You gotta do new. Doesn't that say a lot about Lovecraft being a psychotic racist that he feared things he didn't understand?”
“I don't think now's the time for subtlety or nuance."
At the start, you’re just a penguin poking around some strange human infrastructure. Cabins. Radio towers. Eventually, you start finding bodies. Weird markings. Blood. Death. People speaking in strange tongues. And that’s before you toss yourself down a strange hole and discover what’s beneath the ice. Slavery. Power. The unknown. But you waddle forward anyway.
Specifics require spoilers, but suffice to say, Penguin Colony follows a similar arc to Umurangi Generation, where by the end, you don’t have to wonder what the game is about. The analogies to Gaza and the world's broad indifference to a genocide are quickly evident, and these are topics and positions that Origame Digital never concealed in their pitch for the game. Their transparent politics meant they ended up pitching the game a lot despite the initial excitement around them as a developer coming off of a hit like Umurangi Generation.
“When you do have that critical hit, this award-winning thing, every publisher on Earth wants to be your best friend and they want to sign whatever you're doing on the dotted line,” said Faulkner. “[…] We went and started pitching Penguin Colony and decided to do the honest, good-spirited thing where you tell the publisher exactly what you want to do. They've all got all this cash after COVID. Suddenly they all go, ‘Oh, well, we're actually not looking for these kind of games or we've got all our slots for this sort of thing.' Oh, fuck you, then.”
The publisher they ended up with, Fellow Traveler, tracks. Citizen Sleeper, 1000xResist, and other games play within the same politically-charged narrative sandboxes as Penguin Colony.
Moral positions take on greater stakes when you’re now an established studio with a staff whose livelihoods are dependent on funding.
“I remember midway through development, I was having a bit of a—man, I'm fucking gambling the whole studio here with like probably getting put on a blacklist or something,” said Faulkner.
Whether Penguin Colony generates a backlash won’t be known until people can play it. But it's not hedging any of its bets.
“Game developers have convinced themselves they need to do some kind of subtlety to their politics because they want the people who disagree with their politics to still play their games,” said Faulkner. “Why? […] We don't care about those people's opinions or voices to what we make. They can go play literally anything else.”