H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential writers of the last century. He has made his presence felt in role-playing games, film, literature, manga, anime and of course, video games. His shadow is long and inescapable and even today his cosmic horror and his myths keep being reinvented and what he did and how he did it continues to be revisited in a way few artists can claim to have achieved. His inventive capacity was unique and it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever see it again.
It’s also true that he was a complex man. Absurdly racist even by the standards of the time, with political ideas that were contradictory and hard to sum up, even if in the last years of his life he redeemed himself and made an effort to make up for what he’d said and done, that’s not how he’s remembered. An unredeemed racist who couldn’t keep all his work from exuding racism and a streak of malice. Which is, up to a point, true. And Penguin Colony, a game based on At the Mountains of Madness, isn’t afraid to build on that idea.
A studio no stranger to controversy
Penguin Colony starts with a simple premise, though not an easy one. What if At the Mountains of Madness, the only novel H. P. Lovecraft wrote, starred penguins? As a penguin colony, we’ll have to discover the secrets hidden in Antarctica, the ones hidden beyond the stars, but also those that are in plain sight on our own planet. Because the game has no problem rewriting many aspects of the original novel.
Because here humans still lose their minds, but they aren’t just any humans. Our penguins waddle around, making adorable springy sounds when they jump and taking the cutest little dives into the water, but Antarctica is home to a Nazi expedition searching for secrets. Secrets from beyond the stars.
This is where the game shines. In how it shows Lovecraft’s work through those lenses: the cosmic horror one and the political one. We see humans lose their minds and talk about things beyond their and our understanding (as penguins and players), but we also see their Nazi plans unfold. And the game spares nothing in that respect. It doesn’t try to whitewash Lovecraft or his sympathies, even if at the end of his life, to be fair, he was a direct opponent of Nazism. The game is markedly antifascist and it’s something comes through clearly in the game. Because here there are two terrors: the horror that comes from the stars and the terror that comes from Germany.
But this shouldn’t surprise us either. The studio’s previous game, ORIGAME DIGITAL, is the extraordinary Umurangi Generation. A first-person photography game where we live in an authoritarian future and have to try to take the best photos possible while dodging the authorities. Or defying them. Creating a strong antifascist message, even if the game actively avoids preaching at us with it.
Penguins everywhere
In every other respect, Penguin Colony is fresh and interesting in its approach to exploring a 3D environment. Closer to Death Stranding with penguins than to anything else, the game asks us to not only explore, but also discover what’s happening in an Antarctica occupied by two forces that are beyond the penguin colony’s understanding. But that deeply affect them.
To do that we must, simply, explore the environment. But a single penguin can’t do it alone, hence the name of the game. The game’s most distinctive mechanic is that, at any moment when we come across another penguin, we can switch to controlling it. This will have very specific uses because depending on its size and its kind, it’ll be able to access places or do different things the others couldn’t. After all, an emperor penguin is much bigger and can hold its breath much longer than a chinstrap, but the latter can slip through holes and slide down slopes in a way the former can’t.
In this way, the game’s mechanics reinforce a clear idea: the need for community. How these penguins’ strength comes from being a colony, not a single penguin chosen to be the hero of the story. Each one does its bit and does what it can to help us in our goal, as channelers of their power, but they are the heroes of the story. The whole penguin community. In one of the most original games and one that has best understood Hideo Kojima’s game and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
That’s why Penguin Colony is worth playing. Because we rarely see games this original, this well put together and this smart. And even if it were only for how adorable these penguins are, it’d already be worth it.
