Cthoot cthoot



Penguin Colony reviewA clever and unforgiving send-up of Lovecraftian race horror, with lumpy platforming and a surprising amount of FromSoftware DNA.

Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp.

Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word "sex". I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk. Then I flop on my belly and slither out of camp, chasing the whistling wires of the wind. For I am a penguin. These creatures, their flags, their words and their elder gods mean little to me. I might accidentally witness their hubris and self-deception and savage talk of racial hierarchies and destiny, but I am not some befuddled Miskatonic bookworm consumed by sweaty urges toward worlds beyond ken. I am a penguin. I just happened to be hopping through here while all this weird shit was going on.



All told, the penguins of Penguin Colony are a winningly silly source of critical distance from the carnival-mirror imperialism of, in this case, At The Mountains Of Madness, a Lovecraft novella that usefully features a bunch of monster penguins. Created by Umurangi Generation devs Origame Digital, an Indigenous team working in Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung land, Penguin Colony retains the novella's broad arc of explorers from the global north venturing into a frozen eldritch necropolis, but otherwise gives the story a kicking.

In this adaptation, set a few years after Lovecraft's death, the explorers have become German Nazi occultists with a few English collaborators, including Brown's temporally adrift narrator. Rather than the impossible architecture of Lovecraft's stories, later areas resemble dessicated modern cities built on stolen land. The game also introduces a redemption narrative in the shape of a group of Māori warriors, who are briefly controllable between chapters. The Māori group are questing to stop the dafty fascists from waking a dormant starspawn, which they have somehow misidentified as the "one true Aryan king". Again, though, none of that's your problem. You're a goddamn penguin.

There are several playable penguin varieties in Penguin Colony, and you can switch between them freely by walking up to one and hitting Y button. Should you accidentally flop into a crevasse or a puddle of wormy Shoggoth juices, the world is full of back-up birds, dozing on bergs or in caverns. There are rudiments of a class system, which factors into optional terrain puzzles: some penguins are heavy enough to press floor switches, while baby penguins can't swim but are able to fit through tunnels, revealing new areas or shortcuts.



While the game recreates the calls of different species, I'm not sure Penguin Colony does much justice to the inner life of penguins. They're just a fun, disposable dramatic device, riffing on Pingu and Happy Feet as much as they do the six-foot dreadsquawkers of Lovecraft's story. I'm also not sure Penguin Colony is the best penguin platformer I've played, which isn't exactly a huge tent, because penguins, bless 'em, are not obvious ground-based acrobats. The penguins in Penguin Colony are, to be frank, janky as hell. They boop and stutter up inclines, often allowing you to 'cheat' the geography. They 'slide' like thei...Read more: Full article on www.rockpapershotgun.com

What do you think about this?