Penguin Colony review: Antarctic exploration, Nazis and Lovecraftian horror
Origame Digital's semiopen world game casts players as a penguin collecting human language in a frozen wasteland haunted by Nazis and eldritch entities, The Guardian says.
At a glance
- Penguin Colony, from developer Origame Digital, is a semiopen world Antarctic exploration game reviewed by The Guardian.
- Players control a penguin collecting words, or human language, and can swap into other penguins with different abilities.
- The Guardian praises its unsettling retelling of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness despite minor audio and control bugs.
Penguin Colony, a semiopen world exploration game from developer Origame Digital, puts the player in control of a penguin that hops, swims and glides across a frozen Antarctic wasteland also occupied by Nazis and Lovecraftian entities. In a review published by The Guardian, the game is described as an audacious and frequently brilliant retelling of HP Lovecraft's 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness.
The Guardian's reviewer notes that the penguin is pursuing the same unearthly entity that the Nazis are chasing, and that the collectibles scattered through the world are not gold coins but words. The result is an unusual mission: gathering human language.
Swapping bodies and shifting landscapes
Different penguins bring different abilities. Tapping a button beside another penguin lets the player swap into its body; rockhoppers are nimble movers that jump especially high, while fluffy chicks can squeeze through narrow gaps.
The early polar levels are relatively straightforward, with snow drifts, ice floes and traces of human habitation such as fishing huts. The surroundings soon grow stranger, the review says, giving way to supersized stone labyrinths, alien-looking obelisks and deep crevasses, all rendered in jagged, low-poly graphics that the reviewer likens to a hallucinated PlayStation 2 game.
A deep-voiced narrator recounts the expedition of a scientist from decades earlier who, according to the review, is driven by the same hubris and racism as his Nazi successors. The layering of space, time and narrative is called terrifically unsettling. The reviewer recalls coming across a Nazi cannibal feasting on a fellow soldier while a researcher delivered another verbose speech about a God-given right to plunder the Earth's southernmost tip. Jarring cuts to archive footage and what appear to be Indigenous artworks interrupt the low-poly action.
Technical flaws and a cosmic finale
The Guardian finds the game a little uneven technically, citing a small number of audio glitches and occasional bugs with the controls, though it says these do not overly detract from the experience.
The review says Penguin Colony builds to an incendiary conclusion: a takedown of Lovecraft's racism and Nazi barbarism that also invites the player to see the world in newly reenchanted terms. At the end, a cosmological map details everything discovered on a playthrough — and, more tantalisingly, everything missed. The Guardian calls the game one of 2026's boldest and most original, and says that to excavate all of its meaning, players must stop acting like a human heading straight for an objective and instead wander like a renegade penguin, towards atrocity and beauty alike.
Source: The Guardian Technology.
Questions and answers
- What is Penguin Colony about?
- It is a semiopen world exploration game in which players control a penguin in Antarctica, chasing an unearthly entity alongside Nazis while collecting words, described as human language.
- Who developed Penguin Colony?
- The game was developed by Origame Digital. The Guardian's review calls it one of 2026's boldest and most original games, despite some audio glitches and control bugs.
- What is Penguin Colony based on?
- It is described as an audacious retelling of HP Lovecraft's 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, mixing eldritch horrors with Nazi characters in an Antarctic setting.
