How do you follow up a game like Umurangi Generation? Maybe move from photography to videography, or go full shooter (which developer Origame Digital do appear to be making too, that one’s just not had a full reveal yet). Perhaps instead of either of those things, you’ll make a game about penguins, which, yeah, no more beating around the bush, that’s exactly what they’ve done. Introducing: Penguin Colony, a narrative adventure game based on H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
The game’s Steam page explains that this is a “radically different perspective” from the original piece of literature, in part because you play as a penguin who hears the “echoes of our narrator describing his plight.” It’s looking like it’s somewhat level-based too, letting you waddle, slide, and swim around, discovering what happened “at your own pace.” A pretty chill sounding time for a game with such heavy source material!
Oh, and the narrator isn’t having a great time, his brain experiencing time out of order after being called by “the old ones,” leaving you, a simple penguin, the only one that can help him. Good stuff.
There even seems to be a suitable amount of gaminess to it too, as you can unlock different penguins for replays. They all have different abilities and challenges too, one of them being a baby penguin so you can fit in smaller gaps, but you can’t swim.
Look, Umurangi Generation is up there as one of my games of the decade, so I’ll be here day one whenever it does drop. Over on the Umurangi Generation Discord server, lead developer Veselok said that a trailer and demo will be turning up in the coming months, so my advice is to wishlist the game on Steam if you’re interested in checking it out.
Oisin Kuhnke
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