A Nazi kneels down on frozen snow, looking at an limitless Antarctic horizon. One other holds a gun to his head, prepared to finish his personal life. I direct a small waddling penguin as much as them, making an attempt to think about what it could possibly be considering. Dismay, maybe. Doubtless bewilderment. However then a faint smile appears to interrupt out throughout its beaky face, as if amused by these foolish people and their misguided perception that they may ever greatest this howling, harsh panorama.
For many video games, the thought of taking part in as a penguin observing Nazis shedding the plot close to the south pole can be bizarre sufficient. However Penguin Colony, developed by Origame Digital, pushes additional. That is an audacious, ceaselessly good retelling of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 novella On the Mountains of Insanity, through which eldritch horrors are simply as widespread as Nazis. Additional weirdness abounds: the numerous collectibles scattered about this place usually are not shiny gold objects à la Tremendous Mario or Sonic. Relatively, they’re phrases. So tottering about as a semiaquatic chook, you could have a singular mission: gather human language.
However let’s zoom out for a second as a result of taking part in Penguin Colony is extra easy than this description suggests. At first, it’s a semiopen world exploration sport through which you direct a penguin to the identical unearthly entity that the Nazis are chasing. You hop, swim and glide about tummy-first, chewing up miles of frozen wasteland like an indefatigable snowboarder. Tapping a button subsequent to a different penguin enables you to swap into its physique. A few of these, just like the rockhopper penguin, are nimble movers, able to leaping particularly excessive. Fluffy penguin chicks, in the meantime, can squeeze via tiny gaps.
At first, the sport’s polar ranges are easy: snow drifts and ice floes peppered with the remnants of human habitation akin to fishing huts. However your environment rapidly develop stranger: supersized stone labyrinths whose architectural splendour evokes Dark Souls, alien-looking obelisks and abyssal crevasses. Every part on the planet is rendered in jagged, low-poly graphics, looming from the display screen like a hallucinated PlayStation 2 sport.
As you navigate these areas, a deep-voiced narrator relays the expedition of a scientist from many years earlier than. It’s clear he’s pushed by the identical hubris and racism as his Nazi successors.
The layering of area, time and narrative is terrifically unsettling. At one level, having simply hopped my approach via a difficult platform part, I got here throughout a Nazi cannibal feasting on his fellow soldier as a researcher delivered yet one more verbose pontification on his God-given proper to plunder Earth’s southernmost tip. At instances, jarring cuts to archive footage and what appear to be Indigenous artwork interrupt the low-poly motion. My head was typically spinning, making an attempt to reconcile all these conflicting, contrapuntal components. Higher, I discovered, to let go and absorb the unnerving, discordant entire.
Penguin Colony is a little bit uneven technically: I skilled a small variety of audio glitches and, at instances, bugs with the controls. But this doesn’t overly detract from an expertise that builds to an incendiary conclusion: a takedown of Lovecraft’s racism and Nazi barbarism whereas additionally, intriguingly, inviting the participant to see the world in newly reenchanted phrases.
This latter level is made with aplomb on the sport’s finish: a spectacular cosmological map that particulars every little thing you found on that playthrough. Extra tantalisingly, it exhibits you all of the belongings you missed. This reveal is liable to induce a sense of vertigo and marvel: Penguin Colony, one in all 2026’s boldest, most authentic video games, is way larger than it first lets on. To entry all of its secrets and techniques and excavate all of its which means, one should assume and act much less like a human mainlining in direction of their goal. Quite the opposite, you have to embrace the spirit of a renegade penguin, waddling carefree in direction of no matter piques your curiosity: atrocity, magnificence and all.