Demo blazes the trailer to Penguin Colony

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

"Radical" re-imagining of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness due out on PC and Switch 2 later this year

Like all good H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, the upcoming game from indie Australian developer Origame Digital promises plenty of cosmic horror, human madness, oppressively isolated environments, and of course, playable penguins... Wait, what? 

Yes, as its title suggests, Penguin Colony is not your standard Lovecraft. Rather, it's described as a "re-imagining" of the author's novella At the Mountains of Madness, with a "radically different perspective" as seen through the eyes of everyone's favourite flightless sea birds.

It's 1939, and two different rival expeditions have been drawn to deep into Antarctica's inhospitable climes to "answer the call of an impossibly ancient being." One group "seeks to extract this inconceivable power for its own destructive means. The other, as it has been doing for generations, hopes to return it to its slumber for another hundred years." The game's narrator belonged to one of these parties whose expeditions have "gone horribly wrong." As he recounts his horrific, unbelievable tale, his "brain no longer experiences time linearly; past, present and future have become one for him." Now, the "only thing who can hear his cry for help is you, a penguin awoken by a flare in the distance." To uncover his story of a dark, "unsettling truth buried beneath the ice," you must "wander the frozen landscape, following the humans in their discoveries, and witnessing their minds collapse under the strain."

Penguin Colony is presented in a low-poly 3D art style similar to the developer's previous game, Umurangi Generation, but this is a much different sort of game experience. Although marketed as a "short narrative adventure game," it is uncovered largely through "environmental discovery" as you waddle, slide and swim your way through "open-ended levels" of blue-drenched snow, ice, wind and sea. But the story of "what happened to the lost expedition of explorers" can't be revealed by one penguin alone. Instead, you're able to switch between different penguins, each with their own "unique abilities and limitations that influence exploration." Where a baby penguin might be small enough to "access tight, hidden spaces" but cannot swim, for example, adult penguins are better able to "traverse the icy waters." Only by utilizing the colony's varied strengths will you be able to fully reveal the "horrors buried under the ice and the dark history of the continent time forgot."

The full version of Penguin Colony is due out sometime later this year on Windows PC and the Nintendo Switch 2, but you can already take an early dive into the playable demo available now on Steam.

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