I’m going to go out on a limb and say that when you think of penguins and video games, Club Penguin is probably the one that comes to mind for you (or the Surf’s Up adaptation if you’re nasty). There aren’t really a lot of games about these flightless birds, and they’re normally on the sillier side when there are because penguins are funny little critters. Penguin Colony, the next game from the devs behind Umurangi Generation, doesn’t completely abandon that silliness, but it does throw in some cosmic horror and the hubris of man in for good measure. And its first demo certainly sets the stage for an old experience.
In Penguin Colony, you are a penguin. One of many, any penguins actually. You can slide on your belly, jump, and swim, a Shadow of the Colossus style stamina meter limiting your ability to walk up steep, icy cliffs and the like. But you do not have to stay as this penguin. The tuxedo wearing animals are found all over the game, of varying sizes and species and benefits and negatives. If you walk up to a baby penguin and switch to it, you can climb under a gap in a fence, but if you try to swim you die, whereas embodying a fully grown adult nets you more stamina.
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Controlling the penguin(s) is admittedly a tad awkward, in a way that feels incidental over purposeful, and yet it still lends itself well to the experience. Waddling along feels stiff and unsatisfying, but when have you ever seen a penguin be graceful while moving on its two feet? This is why you must slide as much as you can, for that’s where things smoothen out.
And then there is the Lovecraftian madness. As you make your way forward, ever forward, at first towards the flare of a human stationed out there in the Antarctic, later towards an obelisk structure that the Nazis (the original ones) claim is linked to an ancient, Aryan race, the voice of Disco Elysium’s Lenval Brown warningly narrates at you his experience in this frozen tundra. It is disquieting and somehow isolating, and I look forward to more in the full game.
You can pick up glowing orbs along the way to restore some stamina, random words appearing as you collect them like indigenous and encyclopedia. They don’t just litter the land either. At one point I came across a man who fell to his knees, violently shaking his head before it exploded, producing an orb for me to add to my portfolio. The word it produced was “sex.”
Penguin Colony’s demo is short, but does at least set the groundwork for a unique critique of fascist ideology. Who could have thought you’d get something like that while playing as a penguin! Right now it doesn’t have a release date, but it is due out in 2026, and you can try out its demo on Steam for yourself right now.
