Melbourne-based game developer Naphtali Faulkner is challenging traditional colonial narratives through Penguin Colony, a weird-fiction video game where players control carefree penguins navigating corrupted Nazi polar exploration camps in a 1939 Antarctica infused with HP Lovecraft’s eldritch horrors.
Antarctic Exploration Intersecting With Lovecraftian Myth-Making
The game places players in the flippers of various penguins—ranging from baby penguins capable of slipping into narrow crevices to teleporting adults—as they move indifferently past the fascist humans populating the frozen landscape. Faulkner points out the intentional tonal dissonance of the setting. The penguins belong in the harsh Antarctic environment, while the European explorers do not. Penguin Colony targets revisionist histories, specifically drawing parallels between pseudoscientific alternate histories like Celtic New Zealand and the real-world origin stories of Australia and settler movements.
Within the game’s narrative framework, Nazi expeditions search for relics to support Aryan race myth-making. Instead, they encounter the unknowable monsters from Lovecraft’s 1930 novella At the Mountains of Madness, foolishly misidentifying them as an ancient Aryan king. Faulkner notes that the core of the story examines the tools and mechanisms that allow colonial myth-making to occur. Rather than relying on standard horror tropes like gore or tentacles, the developer focuses on the subtle horrors of how colonial powers make assumptions and force compliance.
Challenging Silicon Valley Design With Respectful Game Mechanics
Rejecting dominant Silicon Valley design philosophies that spoonfeed complacent content to players, Faulkner turns instead to Wiradjuri professor Norman Sheehan’s framework of respectful design. This philosophy treats human knowledge as something absorbed from the outside world rather than generated entirely internally. Consequently, the narrative structure of Penguin Colony relies on fragmentary, opaque, and partly missable narrative vignettes.
Players will not find clearly marked and quantified collectibles. Instead, navigation is guided subtly by the direction of the wind, a deliberate mechanic designed to recreate the pre-social media mystery once found in video games. Faulkner compares this approach to the 2004 urban legend surrounding Bigfoot in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where players scoured a 36-square-kilometer map following a non-existent breadcrumb trail. That sense of academic or researcher-led discovery mirrors the investigative structure found in classic weird fiction.
Influences From FromSoftware and Past Cyberpunk Photography
Faulkner draws clear inspiration from Japanese studio FromSoftware, known for titles like Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series, which utilize difficulty, complexity, and obscure storytelling to foster community-driven decoding. Self-identifying as an old Souls-head, the Melbourne developer aims to challenge players without implementing the punishing mechanical difficulty characteristic of those titles. The goal is to prompt enduring debates and compel players to view virtual worlds as much larger than expected.
This project follows Faulkner’s previous work, Umurangi Generation, a cyberpunk photography simulation set in Tauranga Aotearoa during a climate crisis. Through both titles, Faulkner critiques commercially driven American design sensibilities, arguing that video games remain an emerging art form that has yet to achieve its full expressive potential.
