Much like the H.P. Lovecraft novella it alternately riffs on and skewers, Penguin Colony takes you to an ancient alien city of crabby cuboid geometry and helical designs – comparable at a glance to Lovecraft’s “terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion”, but here given strangely everyday, anachronistic-seeming labels, such as “Downtown”. Later, you’re shown flashes of footage of the streets of Melbourne in Australia – developer Origame Digital’s base of operations, and a city built on stolen Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung land.
When I first set foot in Downtown, in the unassuming body of a Rockhopper penguin, I thought the broad idea was to satirically redefine modern settlements built by European colonisers as Lovecraftian relics, intrusions from the cosmic beyond. This irony seems most pointed in sections where you steer a group of Māori characters, journeying south to prevent an expedition of German and British Nazi occultists from resurrecting a surviving elder being they call the “one true Aryan king”. Playing as one of the Māori voyagers, you witness the cyclopean city as a realm of spectral high rises and square windows, rearing out of a swamp of blood and bone.
I’m only somewhat correct about all this. Penguin Colony’s reference points are wide-ranging and precise, with the persona of a disinterested penguin serving partly as a means of critical distance from Lovecraft, and partly, as a kind of camouflage for an extremely complex political artwork. It’s easy to treat the game’s critique as wholly retrospective – an alternately mocking and outraged investigation of a horror author whose bigotry is often reduced to an apologetic footnote or tinny performative disclaimer, drowned out by dread augurs of tentacles in the dark. It’s a test of interpretative rigour, amongst other things, for hasty white European reviewers who might slip and slide past the more elaborate allusions into idle chat about Soulslikes.
Speaking to me over videocall, Origame Digital founder and director Naphtali Faulkner acknowledged the broad objective of reframing colonial cities as unearthly aberrations, cutting against cosier visions of colonised Australian land. “There’s a bit of an issue with Australian games, where they tend to be tourism pieces, sometimes,” he comments. “Not in a bad way, but they do not bring up the violence of this country, in anything. They will comfortably sidestep that for a lot of reasons – one is, a lot of the families that are affected by that are still around. Is it [a non-indigenous developer’s] place to tell that story? No. But also, you have this sort of ‘Australiana’ stuff happen quite a lot, where it’s tin roofs and red dirt, that kind of look you see on a postcard.”
Still, Penguin Colony’s “first colonial city” isn’t just a response to ‘Australiana’. It’s also a monument to 2b2t, the ancient Minecraft “anarchy” server that is infamous for its vicious player culture, and somewhat admired for the colossal strangeness of its desecrated geography. 2b2t is an incarnation of Mojang’s sandbox building sim that is so ‘pure’ and unsparing in its priorities that license owners Microsoft can’t entirely acknowledge it. The server’s central spawn has been repeatedly built up, defaced and degraded over 16 years of constant operation, forming a nightmare landscape of lavafalls and Wither holes and floating seas and basalt barricades.
“We took data from that, and we modified it, and made it playable,” Faulkner tells me. “We had to subdivide it, and it had more detail and stuff, and really transform it a lot, but the whole thing was: what is 2b2t? It’s the most realistic depiction of colonisation in a videogame. When you do Minecraft, it’s basically a colonisation simulator where you go extract the trees and stuff but it all magically regrows. 2b2t’s only rules are there’s no rules, and also nothing respawns. You have the Spawn – the Spawn is the most heart-wrenching thing to look at when you first see it, because you know what Minecraft is in your head, you’ve seen those rolling green hills, and then to see it basically be destroyed into oblivion, is a very strong emotion.”
As an inadvertent digital document of colonialism, 2b2t doesn’t offer much hope of reparation and redress. “The only way to build back the Spawn is to go back and replant everything,” Faulkner says. “And you know, fix the damage that was done, but we all know what gamers did to it, right? They’ve done various incursions and things like covering it in lava or water, or making it so that you can’t leave without cheats.” Still, Faulkner considers it “a fascinating relic of gaming”. In general, he is interested in how fiction makers might preserve virtual landscapes that reflect “player-run digital ecosystems of people basically going beyond what the designers thought.”
2b2t’s presence within Penguin Colony is illustrative of how Origame Digital are using Lovecraft over the course of a planned trilogy of “inherently indigenous” Lovecraftian games – not just rebutting the author’s anglophilia and white supremacism, not merely flipping the racial power dynamics so as to “make the indigenous people the skull-measuring scientists”, but taking Lovecraft’s mythos to unfamiliar places and forcing it to serve a politics that Lovecraft himself would despise.
Faulkner himself came across Lovecraft’s work around 15 years ago, having been introduced to it by a university friend. He was unmoved, initially, by the author’s descriptions of eldritch threats and incomprehensible dimensions. “You know how Lovecraft’s described, with Cthulhu – ‘unknowable horror’, ‘madness inducing’,” he says. “And then you see it and it’s kind of like an octopus. It’s a bit underwhelming.” Faulkner grew more intrigued by Lovecraft, however, after seeing other artists adapt his work. He points to the Shadows Over Innsmouth music video created by Carpenter Brut – a contributor to Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number’s OST – and also, to Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, an adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook written from the perspective of a Black man. “I started to understand that Lovecraft isn’t just the author’s works,” he says. “It’s this all-encompassing thing that has inspired so much stuff.”
Even as he pondered Lovecraft and the broader, somewhat dissociative genre of the Lovecraftian, Faulkner was also investigating his own heritage as a Ngāi Te Rangi person living in a former British colony, tracing patterns of invasion, conquest and assimilation that, he says, have repeated themselves since the days of the Romans and Vikings. “I think the reason that I decided to do this, was that when I started to get Lovecraft, it was when I was really starting to have the understanding that every indigenous person has at some point about what colonisation is,” he says. “You know, where you have to learn your own family history, and you have to learn why things are the way they are at the moment. And so to me, it was like that thing of, when you start seeing Lovecraft as this thing about displacement, invasion, destruction, language – it reached me at the perfect time in my life when I was already looking at this stuff, and I thought that it was a really apt analogy.”
Faulkner also sensed that even Lovecraft enthusiasts who are less mindful of the author’s politics were yearning for a fresher kind of Lovecraftian fable. “When it comes to indigenous stuff, the thing is that we’re not really represented in anything, and our histories are rarely given a platform to say stuff, especially in games,” he goes on. “But what I’d sort of looked at with Lovecraft, was that I think fans were ready for it, because people had gotten a little tired of these direct, 1-to-1 adaptations, that still exist in the space of the unknowable horror is unknowable, rather than trying to say, why is the unknowable horror scary?”
The idea of the “unknowable” pervades Lovecraftian fiction, as does the idea of “cosmic indifference”, that terror of being engulfed in a vaster universe of forms and forces that barely register the existence of human beings. This “unknowability” is concentrated in the balefully blank gaze of Psurumin, the otherworldly entity at the far end of Penguin Colony – the last Earthly remnant of an empire spanning hundreds of planets. “I stare into its eyes,” intones Howard Blakely, the game’s English narrator, and an initially unconsenting member of the doomed Nazi expedition. “I stare deep within, and yet I see nothing. I am not even a speck of inane curiosity.”
Penguin Colony overlaps this Lovecraftian “cosmic indifference” with Faulkner’s grief and bewilderment at how perpetrators of empire have insulated themselves from feelings of responsibility or shame. “For example in the southern hemisphere here, Australia and New Zealand, the idea was that the missionaries would say ‘don’t worry, we’re saving them, we’re turning them into Christians, we had to kill the ones who resist’,” he says. “And the soldiers that had immense trauma and guilt from doing that would be consulted by a priest and told, ‘you were doing it for the greater good’.”
“To me it’s saying: how could they do that to us?” Faulkner goes on. “What made them do that? To me as a younger person, it was very ‘unknowable’. You’ve probably talked to other indigenous people, I hope, before in your life, and it’s this kind of thing especially where there’s a lot of pain there, because… how could someone choose to do that? And even to this day, there’s a question around even saying sorry about it. Or there’s questions around people, they want to sort of move on from history, and never bring it up, never acknowledge it again, whilst the injustice of colonisation is still present.”
Howard Blakely is a mirror of sorts for this culture of denial and obfuscation. For all his apparent awareness that Psurumin does not regard him as a fellow being, and that to release the creature would be calamitous, he succumbs to the idea that he can ship the starspawn home as yet another trophy for the British Empire. He dreams of being honoured as a great pioneer by “the London School of Eugenics”, and retiring to a cottage in Western Victoria. These reflections are accompanied by archive illustrations of colonial officers storming the frontier, and video snapshots of Psurumin statues in Melbourne’s civic centres.
Blakely is similarly befuddled about his German Nazi hosts, who are initially his captors. While cautious of them, he also doesn’t see the Nazis as altogether bad. After all, some of them are fellow scholars – surely, they are too refined, too cultured, to be altogether irredeemable. “He doesn’t see himself in history, as he walks through this place,” Faulkner comments. “He doesn’t see the Nazis as the people that we see them as.” In this, Blakely echoes Dyer, narrator of Lovecraft’s At The Mountain Of Madness, who comes to admire the star-faring colonisers his team unearth in the far south, calling them “men of another age and another order of being”. But he is also an expression of political myopia and creeping fascism in the present.
The inspiration for Blakely came partly from Faulkner’s own time in the academic world. “There are tonnes of people who are scientists first, and political thinkers 17th in their thoughts,” he comments, recalling his encounters with Trump supporters as a student. “People who don’t consider themselves political and then end up taking incredible political stances on stuff, until it becomes clear that they do actually have a political ideology, that’s sort of formed by being around the people they’re around.” Faulkner’s other reference points for Blakely include Elon Musk, once “washed through the media as a green, eco-warrior guy”, latterly an advocate for ‘great replacement’ theories and far-right uprisings.
Faulkner says that Penguin Colony’s anti-fascist sentiments are especially aimed at “the rise of gen-Z fascism”, expressed in online transphobia and anti-Semitic memes. “There’s been a huge uptick in people trying to vindicate Hitler, and trying to rehabilitate him in the eyes of this young generation,” he says. “What they say is things like ‘the painter was right’.” Faulkner thinks that this neofascism has “petered out a little bit” over the past ten years, but is still on the march. Above all, he sees its resurgence in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and in the qualms many self-described anti-fascists have about condemning it.
“I and every indigenous person I know, in and out of the games industry, have no nuanced emotions about what is happening there,” Faulkner continues. “We know what this is. Like, it’s our family stories come to life. We can see what this was. We’re not just hearing stories anymore. And we’re not just noticing the violence happening to the indigenous people right now. We’re noticing how the mostly white, non-indigenous people are still conflicted on it and confused on it, and they don’t have clarity on this. The idea with this game was to really bring this into focus, because the games industry likes to say that indigenous people are welcome. And they want to welcome us at our events. What does that mean? You guys want us here to talk, but you’re not going to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous people that’s happening in front of you, that every single human being at this point knows about.”
Penguin Colony ends with a statement calling out the games industry at large for holding its collective tongue about the Israeli military’s brutal campaign, noting that such “cowardice” will be “recorded by the art that it makes”. The flipside of that sentiment is that art can be a record of courage and principle, advancing and nourishing a culture in which xenophobia and colonial ideology are unable to thrive. I see this idea expressed, again, in the journey of the Māori group, who are equipped to prevent Psurumin’s return because they have made doing so a tradition and a practice.
“They know from generations of story, that you have to do it,” says Faulkner. “That it’s a responsibility to do it, when it happens.” Thwarting Psurumin is part of the Māori’s creative lifework, part of their journey together. “It is the job of our descendants to carry forward the story of our resistance,” intones one of their group, the game’s second narrator. “To create song, dance and story, so our people move toward the light and away from darkness… Every 100 years, to compose new haka and follow new paths unknown to our enemy.”
As a whole, Penguin Colony aims to be one such path away from darkness, its methods a mixture of bald and oblique, overt and covert. I have barely broken the surface in this piece. There’s an angry hopefulness to the game that coexists with the spectacle of a distinctly ‘double-A’ penguin bumping and slithering along boulevards of blue-toned, recessed stone. The player is invited to participate in that hope by the game’s closing “expedition” screens, which present all the lore you’ve gathered – including photographs taken by the Nazis, and textual fragments of devious origin – as a web of stars, floating over an illustration of the Zodiac.
The invocation of constellations is gently subversive because a constellation is an act of selective reading, stringing together sparks in a void. Treat the lore as something you can individually exhaust or “100%”, as in many RPGs, and your selective reading will vanish into the mass of motes. Rather than ‘completing’ the star map in solitude, the game invites players to reach out to each other and compare their constellations – a homage to a “pre-social media” era when the distribution of information was less the province of monolithic digital platforms, and also, a framework for political solidarity. “As we live in a world which continues to push us further apart, we invite you to come together, talk, share, and interpret what you saw,” the game suggests.
The call isn’t open to all, however. Penguin Colony is consciously designed to repel those who might identify with its Nazis, appropriating the portrayal much as alt-right memesters sought to deify Anakin Skywalker, in the run-up to this year’s US midterms. As a rhetorical apparatus, Penguin Colony is full of traps, easily overlooked if you focus on its headline politics. “We have a character voiced by a German trans woman – they can’t enjoy it,” notes Faulkner. “It just makes their skin crawl.” There are many more such snares in the game. The commentary on Israel and Palestine, especially, pervades Penguin Colony in ways I don’t think any player has yet discovered.
The lore of Penguin Colony also harbours clues about Origame’s future “inherently indigenous” Lovecraftian games. The next game in that trilogy was actually conceived before Penguin Colony, and will be set decades from now. Faulkner envisages it as a loose retelling of Shadows Over Innsmouth, Lovecraft’s story about fishpeople cults and miscegenation in a remote coastal town. “It’s this idea of, what does Lovecraft look like in a future that we’re heading towards, in the sense of social isolation and landscapes of small town decay.”
In place of a Dagon cult, Origame Digital’s next game will focus on groups of secretive violent bigots, with the player playing the part of a detective – a premise that, more superficially, makes me eager for a resurrection of the photography mechanics in Origame’s reputation-making Umurangi Generation. As with Penguin Colony, the concept draws heavily on Faulkner’s own life experiences.
“I grew up in a cattle town, and cattle towns are notoriously pretty racist places,” he says. “The whole thing is when I left the town, when I was 18, just because I was going to university, I learned that the town had an active KKK [branch] that was being run out of the Anglican church. And this town is one town away from Grafton, which is where the white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant is from – the guy who went and shot up the mosque in Christchurch. How does that happen? Where everyone knows about it, but they hush up?” The forthcoming game will look at how bitterness and neglect may give rise to such hatred, as local economies dry up and support structures are stripped away.
The second game will also take inspiration from the North American concept of a “sundown town”, in which non-white people face violence if they linger outdoors after sunset – a vicious history also explored in Matt Ruff’s HBO-adapted novel Lovecraft Country. “I went through a big rabbit hole on Youtube of hearing stories of people talking about, like, getting lost on the highway, needing to stop for gas, and then realising they had to stop it for gas at a sundown town,” Faulkner explains. “They stopped there. They go to pay. And the clerk just sort of gives them a look, and then nudges over to them that there’s a guy in the back of the shop just looking at them. And then suddenly they’re followed on the highway for an hour.”
The final game in Origame Digital’s planned trilogy is far more formless, right now, but Faulkner has dreams of venturing into the realm of cooperative multiplayer. “It’s not even written down on paper yet,” he says. “We’ve just talked about it. For one thing, I don’t know if I’ve got the skills to do it, because Penguin Colony had some jank, and had some technical issues at launch, but I’m getting better at making games.”
This multiplayer project would build on Penguin Colony’s premise of playing a colony, hopping between penguin bodies while shadowing Blakely’s expedition. It would also follow through on the former game’s closing encouragement to make allies against inhumanity via the collective interpretation of a celestial expanse of lore. “It’s about the whole group, and I think if the third one was going to make a point about coming together to solve the problem… you probably want to make that a mechanical issue,” Faulkner speculates, “where we have to actually make players do these sorts of actions together.”
