Penguin Colony review: A daringly weird horror game whose atmosphere and surprises overcome its rough edges

Need to know

What is it? Lovecraftian horror through the eyes of a penguin.
Release date October 16, 2026
Expect to pay $15 / £13
Developer Origame Digital
Publisher Fellow Traveller
Reviewed on RX 9070 XT, Core i5 12600K, 32 GB RAM, Steam Deck
Multiplayer No
Steam Deck Verified
Link Steam

Penguin Colony is a work of cosmic horror that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in scares from the beyond, even though its unique penguin platforming can be frustrating to wrangle. It's a radical recontextualization of an H.P. Lovecraft classic with a clear affection for the writer's storytelling, but also scathing contempt for his racism.

For my money, it's not October without a weird-ass new indie horror game leaving a lasting impression on me, and Penguin Colony has satisfied my annual craving. You are a penguin witnessing the events of the Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness. Your powers are honk, slide, swim, and hop.

Rather than being limited to a specific bird, you are able to possess any penguin you come across, theoretically using different species' abilities to tackle different movement challenges. Aside from using little baby penguins to squeeze into tight spaces, I was almost exclusively a Rockhopper main: Their impressive vertical jump was a boon in many areas. They shoulda hooped instead of investigating The Strange.

The GOAT, PC Gamer Tales from The Hard Drive host Lenval Brown, narrates the adventure from the perspective of a customarily neurotic and verbose Lovecraft protagonist. Brown's delivery lends everything a similar emotional weight to his iconic performance in Disco Elysium, and he makes for a comforting, familiar presence⁠ even as things go all nasty crazy style.

Waddle on

I remain conflicted over Penguin Colony's movement and mechanics: I didn't find them especially fun, they got in the way, but that also felt weirdly appropriate. As a penguin, waddling around is kinda shitty and sluggish, particularly as the levels shift away from their native habitat.

Most charitably, there's a Foddian (Getting Over It, Baby Steps) quality to the mechanical exploration. It got me to really lean in for some tricky traversal as the atmosphere reached its most suffocating and intense in the caves and structures deep under the arctic ice⁠. I felt frustrated and restless as Penguin Colony's coolest levels opened up before me, held back as I was by this little penguin body. But that dovetails quite well with Penguin Colony's whole premise: that you are an inhuman observer of a human (and something else) story.

A more clear-cut negative was an inconsistency with a mantling (do penguins mantle?) feature (was this intentional?) that felt more like a clipping glitch, letting me clear some ledges but not others. Penguin Colony's appropriately minimalist UI has one glaring exception: A Shadow of the Colossus-style circular stamina meter that appears only when your stamina is depleting. It is distractingly massive and neon-colored, and it usually wasn't clear what the relationship was between what I was doing and the stamina bar's drain. It had a mind of its own, and was never a welcome sight during my playtime.

At its best, though, the penguin parkour contributed to this feeling that I was a small, insignificant thing skirting the edges of a drama I only partially understood. We as humankind are effectively unknowable elder gods to the rest of the animal kingdom, and Penguin Colony largely succeeded in evoking a one-of-a-kind sense of dual-layer cosmic horror through its mechanics.

Side stories

None of what follows is an explicit "Vader is Luke's da" spoiler, but this is definitely a game that thrives on surprise and interpretation. If you are already convinced you'd like to play, please leave the browser tab open⁠—ideally on multiple devices and refreshing regularly⁠—until you've completed Penguin Colony. Then come back and finish reading.

Penguin Colony is not a 1:1 retelling of At the Mountains of Madness. Lenval Brown voices a new character named Howard Blakely⁠—as opposed to the original story's William Dyer⁠—and the passages he narrates are a pitch-perfect imitation of Lovecraft's distinctive prose.