In a new trailer at the Six One Indie Showcase, Origame Digital showed off its first trailer for Penguin Colony, a horror game where you play as a little penguin, and the studio revealed that the game will be anchored by a performance from Lenval Brown, the narrator of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut.
We got the first screenshots and pitch for Penguin Colony back in June: A reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, told from the perspective of a penguin. The original story centers on the discovery of an impossible lost city in the Antarctic and, it must be said, is told from the perspective of a Miskatonic University guy who goes crazy from all the alien stuff, not a penguin. Miskatonic U. faculty were some of Howard Philips Lovecraft's favorite guys to drive cuckoo, you see.
The game's narrator, Howard Blakely, is a new character played by Brown, speaking to the penguin protagonist over vast distances—though he's still a Miskatonic man. "Our narrator is part of an expedition which has gone horribly wrong," Penguin Colony's Steam page explains. "Having been called by the old ones, his brain no longer experiences time linearly. Past, present and future have become one for him. The only thing who can hear his cry for help is you, a penguin awoken by a flare in the distance."
Penguin Colony's trailer shows the flightless bird exploring a desolate, icy landscape, swimming between floating blocks of ice, doing that cute little belly slide move, and, of course, approaching a cryptic forest of stone effigies produced by a long-forgotten society.
The end of the trailer gives us a peek at one of the unholy monstrosities we can expect to find under the ice, and while things never turn out well for ole' HPL's human protagonists, I'm still holding out hope that nothing bad happens to the sweet little penguins.
Penguin Colony's premise is enticing enough on its own, but it's also a new game from the studio behind one of the most interesting and exciting games of the past few years: Umurangi Generation, a first-person cyberpunk adventure where you play a photographer using their camera to document the atrocity, absurdity, and strange beauty of a world in the midst of a climate apocalypse.
Origame's debut took home the IGF's Excellence in Narrative and Seumas McNally Grand Prize at GDC 2021, and their future work has always been something worth keeping an eye on. Penguin Colony currently has no set release date, but you can wishlist it over on Steam. In the meantime, if you'd like to hear more of narrator Lenval Brown's signature growl, check out PC Gamer's documentary series Tales From the Hard Drive, which he hosted.
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