Image: Origame Digital & Fellow Traveler

Umurangi Generation was a one-of-a-kind experience. A creeping, slow-burn horror experience disguised as a fun and funky urban photography game, snapping photos of graffiti and street racers, as well as the apocalyptic horrors looming over and seeping into your city. So, where next for Origame Digital? An even wilder swing. Penguin Colony is a horror adventure inspired by Lovecraft's novels, John Carpenter's The Thing and more, narrated by the ever-impressive Lenval Brown (of Disco Elysium fame), and casting you as a regular, casually unbothered penguin.

There might be swarms of Nazis losing their minds, mutating into hideous monsters or being consumed by eldritch abominations lurking in the snow here, but you don't care. Because you are a penguin. Penguins do not freak out, because they are stout flightless birds. Curious, perhaps, as you explore the Antarctic wastes, swim through the depths and belly-slide across the ice, observing the chaos unfurling around you, and generally being a penguin. Sometimes you squawk at stuff, too. Being a penguin is simple.

While I've not finished it yet, Penguin Colony is clearly a game with things to say. While most cosmic horror stories make nods to Lovecraft, they tend to swerve away from dealing with the unvarnished racism underpinning many of his stories, especially in how they talked about anyone with a skin color other than snowy white. Sure, unknowable alien gods are scary, but you know what else is? Foreigners.

The fantastic narration tells the story of a scientist who threw his lot in with a Nazi expedition to the Antarctic to find the tomb of the first and greatest Aryan King. Meanwhile, a B-plot unfurls, following a squad of Maori heroes trying to avert the apocalypse that the Nazis might unleash. A third plot thread follows a morally bankrupt American journalist who's enamored with the German's patriotism - a common sentiment in the early phases of World War 2.

And while all of this might be playing out in the backdrop, your penguins can find glowing orbs of insight, that teach you new words and concepts, like 'Nation', and 'Myth-making', and 'Colonization'. Y'know - the really GOOD words. Nothing bad could POSSIBLY come from filling a penguin's head with all that knowledge. While the game is split into distinct chapters, exploration of each is non-linear, but all of the threads you can explore all pull towards a central thesis that's as unsettling as any of the sci-fi body horror weirdness going on around you. But at least you can roll with it, because you're a penguin.

That said, there's surprising depth to being a penguin! You're not playing as any particular penguin either. Find one that you'd rather play as? You can switch control to them. Die? You're automatically assigned another nearby penguin to be. You can perform flips and tricks as you ramp off icy ledges, and some penguins have special abilities. Rockhopper penguins are good at climbing, baby penguins can't swim yet but can squeeze through small holes to reach hidden areas, and Magellanic penguins are just weird and spooky and I'll leave you to figure out what their deal is.

If there's any criticism to be levelled at Penguin Colony, it's that it's janky and raw. Umurangi Generation had some wobbly bits but it mostly kept the player on flat, easily navigable terrain to avoid weirdness. Penguin Colony allows you to hop, wiggle, jump, flip, slide and explore wherever you want through very open environments, and sometimes that means getting stuck in geometry. The environment can sometimes look a bit too low-fi sometimes, too. Nothing that hurt the atmosphere too much for me, though, and it was made up for by the fantastic audio - Carpenter-inspired doom-laden synths, plus that wonderful narration.

But like Umurangi Generation before it, this is a game that is both fearlessly tackling complex subject matter in a way that no other game has really tried. Plus, it's just kinda fun to be a penguin, cheerfully unbothered by the three-way apocalyptic nightmare unfurling around you. It's also, given the state of the world today, strangely relatable. Maybe these flightless birds have some good ideas going on...

Penguin Colony is out now for £12.79/$15, with a demo if you want to have a little waddle around before putting your money down. It's also available in a discount bundle with Tenebris Somnia, the third horror game releasing today that I've been excited for. Thanks to publisher Fellow Traveller for the early key.