Every waddle, monster, and unsettling discovery serves Tali Faulkner's uncompromising political vision

At first glance, Penguin Colony might look like a cute, if slightly unsettling, throwback to the PlayStation 2 era. You play as a penguin waddling, sliding, and swimming through the shadowy Antarctic wilderness, following a mysterious light. But there are also Nazis. And ancient cosmic horrors. And a searing indictment of colonialism lurking beneath the ice.

The latest game from Origanme Digital (Umurangi Generation) reimagines H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness through the eyes of Antarctica's indigenous inhabitants, transforming a seemingly absurd premise into a deeply personal work of psychological horror. For Tali Faulkner, a Māori developer from New Zealand, the monsters of Penguin Colony aren't nearly as frightening as the real-world atrocities that inspired them.

In a sprawling conversation with Polygon, Faulkner unpacks how penguins, Nazis, Lovecraft, and his own Indigenous perspective collided to create a bold new lo-fi horror game that is also extremely playable. Below, the artist explains why he felt compelled to confront everything from the violence in Palestine and what he sees as a failure of the video game industry to respond to the horrors unfolding in plain sight, in a package where nailing the level design and core mechanics were just as important as the messages.

Polygon: The clash of Penguin Colony’s Playstation 2-coded penguins traversing a murky arctic wasteland, and its ultimate antifascist and anticolonial messages, reminded me more of great comics than games, like Art Spiegelman or Mike Mignola books.

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