Engadget Indie Pitch: Penguin Colony

Engadget Indie Pitch: Penguin Colony “You won’t know until you do and then it is too late.” There are so many rad and important games coming out from smaller studios all the time, and the Engadget Indie Pitch is here to highlight some that you simply must see. We've been around long enough to remember the days when Steam was curated by hand, with 20 or so titles added to the storefront in any given month. Today, roughly 2,000 games go live every month on Steam, and that's not counting all of the console, mobile and VR titles we have to consider. A vast majority of these games come from smaller teams, solo creators, artist collectives and independent studios who don't have immediate access to shiny showcases or marketing teams — which brings us to the Indie Pitch. We can't cover every excellent new game here, but we can offer a curated slice of indie pie every now and then. The Engadget Indie Pitch features a Q&A with the developer of an in-production or recently released game that's caught our eye. Today, it's a chat with ORIGAME DIGITAL founder Naphtali Faulkner about their next project, Penguin Colony — a Lovecraftian horror story that highlights the similarities between cosmic and colonial indifference, as witnessed by a waddling Antarctic penguin. It's ORIGAME's second title, following the award-winning dystopian photography sim Umurangi Generation, which landed in 2020. Here's to your backlog. Penguin Colony by ORIGAME DIGITAL What is Penguin Colony about? It is a sincere attempt to bring into existence a Lovecraft renaissance. The game harkens back to the PS2 era of games which were experimental and weird. It's been difficult to explain to people what the game is without them just playing it. There is some genre bending and direct homage to things which to me encapsulate Lovecraftian horror, but also new elements which are my own. The central idea is to examine and re-evaluate themes present throughout all the works: The game is about the inherent colonial themes (Invasion, Annexation, Indifference, etc.) of Lovecraft, and the author's problematic history of racism and pseudo-science. We read not only Lovecraft's fictional works but also his political reading in The Conservative. Some may say you can separate the art from the artist — but with Lovecraft is it really a surprise that an author who popularized the "fear of the unknown" was a xenophobe? Rather than re-interpreting Lovecraft into something it isn't, we want to go back to the past which informed the writing and examine these themes. There is a tendency in Lovecraft adaptations to do historical negationism to make them palatable to today's audiences, because the assumption is that the narrators are the protagonists. For our game Penguin Colony, the Penguin is a neutral vessel for the story but the narrator isn't — we learn about the expedition through the perspective of a man who is complicit and unaware of the point of history he belongs in. We then see a dueling perspective from…