Penguin Colony was made to 'put the games industry on notice'

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. You mentioned a personal Alan Moore influence ahead of our call, which feels on that wavelength. What advantage did you gain from making Penguin Colony a game rather than a work in any other medium?

Tali Faulkner: We're in the tenth art form, right? Games are the tenth art form that humanity has created — like film was the sixth. And to me, games are the only art form where interaction is compulsory. You can go to an art exhibit and interact with it, but not really. Whereas games, you actually have to embed and do something. And so, wanting to really talk about this stuff with Penguin Colony — you've probably heard the characters talk or you found photographs and stuff like that — ensuring that stuff was not talked around and, like, nuance-ified where someone could say, “I don't really have to worry about this. I can just sort of just ignore it.” — that was really important.

Once the game got to that point where we'd put in dialogue, the photographs, it really became a thing of creating little set pieces that you can only really experience in a game. That sort of uncomfortable feeling of being around something and it not acknowledging you back. In movies you can kinda do it if you're using the right cinematography, but only games are you around that thing for as long as you wanna be, and… some of the guys are gorging on their friends, right? The sound effect that plays there is just on loop and it's really up to you how long you wanna be around that 'cause it is such an unsettling noise

That’s threaded throughout the whole work. That's why when you play the game, you can really go off the beaten path and it's not punished, you'll just find different things. And especially toward the end when you get to the city, there's tons of stuff there and you can miss basically all of it. You'll get to the end and you'll understand the realizations about the universe, that there is a colonial origin, something that originates colonial thought and it's older than mankind and it's much more violent, and this idea repeats over history, but It's the kind of thing where if you do want to go looking for more, you will be rewarded for that.

You may also descend into madness. The PS2 aesthetic is not far off from Backrooms-style found footage.

I think non-Euclidean games are definitely an Eldritch idea. We wanted to make that space feel expansive and beyond what you know. I think players will come into this expecting one thing and then go out of it going, I did not expect that but that's really the Lovecraftian thing, right? Your frame of reference gets expanded. And that's where all the madness comes in with Lovecraft. It’s that idea that someone can't comprehend what they've seen.

How do you know when a kernel of an idea is worth developing into a full-blown game?

It helps when the government funds it.

Those of us in the U.S. are jealous of that.

Well, it's really great Australia's doing it, but man they can do so much more. If you're in games for the free money, it doesn't make a lot of sense when you can do film. The most you can take for a game in Australia is like $100,000. The minimum amount you can take for making a movie in Australia is like $10 million. That’s astronomically different amounts of money.

Sounds like your next game just needs a lot more FMV in it.

No spoilers, I guess, but we've got some ideas. Anyway, we were pitching [Penguin Colony], but were also working on something else. But then they said “This is great, we want this.” So we dropped everything in relatively quick turnaround. We got funded last year. Then we went to PAX Australia and found a publisher who was the right fit. The wrong publisher in this game would have killed it. Like there would have been concerns for censorship that don't exist.

If marketability comes up, there may be some tense conversations.

We pitched really early on with people saying like, “This is what it is. I totally get if you know, if it's not your cup of tea, let's just like end the discussion. Let's not waste any more time.” Fellow Traveler was really willing to give it the full attention it needed. After that we had a pretty rapid development of just one year. And basically that one year was just finishing the game because what we showed them was already like a pretty hearty experience.

But I would definitely say that the government funding definitely helped. And you know, hopefully more countries decide that it's worth investing in games, seeing as they make so much money anyway. You only really need to get one that does really well and suddenly the tax that studio pays just paid for the last five years of duds.

How did the vision for Penguin Colony cohere as you developed it? What was the point or pillar that guided your big choices?

To be honest, it was to put the games industry on notice. Like, what are we doing? You know what I mean?

When you're indigenous, you see the games industry pretty differently. And especially if you're like me, and you pass pretty easily and people forget you're indigenous if they don't see your hands… when I joined the games industry after Umurangi Generation, people would say, “We want to hear more voices in the games industry.” And then an indigenous genocide happens and they don't do anything. They decide it's not their problem.

There's this inaction of suddenly indigenous life is completely meaningless. And it's a pretty hostile space to be in. I'm not even at the highest level of hostility; I'm just an indigenous person. I'm not Palestinian. Palestinian people have been banned from everything. Every Palestinian person in the games industry that I know, they are considered high risk to the point where, if they're on a project, it doesn't get made. There's all of these things that get in the way. “You’re on the project, the Kickstarter's gonna get killed.” “You're on the project, well then publishers aren't interested.” “You're a main writer, don't tell your actual story, please.” So one of the real intentions with [Penguin Colony] was to ensure that it came out in a way where there's none of these excuses anymore. It seems like the game's gonna do OK, so any concerns about “these games don't sell well…” — well mark that one off, right? “We don't think it's got mass appeal.” Well, we got 90,000 wishlists before launch.

The game is really to put them on notice, to say, “You guys don't know what you're talking about. You're making these excuses that do not bear out in reality. And they're based in this deep racism for indigenous people.” The point was to really bring it all into focus: If anyone was to tell me that you're not allowed to tell an indigenous story about colonization, that's great, I'll tell them to get fucked.

The games industry's complacency and complicity on this is not an excuse anymore. They have to do something. The fact that people's cowardice and careerism is so present even you know even three years into the death you can see in satellite footage of Gaza… it's been completely destroyed. What the fuck are people waiting for? I think it's just a real fucking shame that it's like, we have to be the ones to tell you that.

Was it a challenge to make a polemic playable? Based on that perspective, and even the greater riff on Lovecraft, people may not realize it’s also pretty fun to wander around as a penguin.

We weren't worried because the whole thing was sincere. I think you only have to worry about that if you're being ironic. If you're being sincere, and someone can taste the sincerity of what you're saying, they want to see it out. Something happened along the way with games where suddenly all of them are super ironic. A big thing that drives me nuts is when people reference memes and it's a main plot point. Get out of here!

We wanted to grab the audience's attention and they’re gonna see this through to the end because we're gonna keep giving them things that are out of left field. People go into the game and they don't know it's about Nazis and they think this is David Attenborough giving a talk about penguins. Everyone was talking about Werner Herzog before we did the Nazi reveal. They're going, this is a “Werner Herzog game.” So they all get in there and then they get to the reveal and they go, “Hang on, you're not supposed to do that in a cute, wholesome penguin game.”

Then you get to an obelisk coming out of the ice and the Nazis have basically already written a story as to what they think it is. You get to those creatures, the shoggoth, and you go, “What the fuck is that? What is a shoggoth?!?” You'll hear more about that, but you'll also hear that these guys are inventing a history where they say shoggoth are the perfect slave race. They're full of shit.

How much effort went into perfecting the penguin movements so that it works for all that discovery?

The game's so minimalist — you are focusing on that penguin the whole time. You gotta find ways to make that interesting. Any small bug that pops out needs to get fixed because if people are seeing that, they're gonna hate this game.

I think the general movement and traversal is fun enough that once you realize that you can swap between them, “this one's better at this and this one's better for this,” the gameplay horizontally sweeps out. You can play this game very differently if you’re thinking as a different penguin.

Giovanni mentioned it in his review, but at the end, it shows you this is what you found and this is what you missed. And when it shows you what you found and what you missed, it's not only like the words or the photos, it's parts of the story you miss too. There's this many chapters and you only found this many of them. And what you missed is in some ways context to what happened in the grand scheme of the story. But the best way to get people to actually find that is by getting them to swap to the different penguins and placing them in ways where people get curious and wander off. That's what a penguin would do, right? It would go, “Hmm, there's a giant gate here, I'm gonna walk around the side and just go in that little cave and suddenly there's like glowing weird stuff.”

How do you lean as far in as you can on the visual style?

Xbox 360 visuals were hyper-impressionist. You couldn't do realism yet, so you had to be just on the edge of realism — but it was still almost like a painting. PlayStation 2, like a generation earlier, they were trying to do that, but they just didn't have the power. So they'd have to imply things with noise and texture. Resident Evil 4 is a grainy game, right? In that grain, your brain imagines things that aren't there. And with Penguin Colony, it's such a barren game anyway, then when you see the shoggoth for the first time and it's this repeating texture and strange hair and stuff, you go, “What the hell is that???” Your brain is gonna work overtime.

It's using this technology that's been in games for ages called inverse kinematics on the legs. And we have this strange hair shader that's made by this Unity whiz called Kvant. And we've done it in a way where it kind of looks like tentacles, but it also looks like droopy hair. Droopy wet hair. I love it because it's so reactive and strange. You don't need this, like, RTX bullshit. Your brain is doing that.

There seems to have been a very clear vision for Penguin Colony and you accomplished those early goals. Was there any pressure along the way?

I mean, look, this could always be our last game, to be honest. We don't know. This could be the door gets shut for our studio. If that's the case, it was worth doing it. Some of the pressures to me really came down from trying to ensure that this thing stays true to what it's about. I guess my thought was: you can't please everyone. You shouldn't try to with this. At no point were we like, “Well, the Germans had a point.” There's nothing like that in there.

Any form of resistance to colonialism is always going to be answered by people who, you know, don't want you to do that. But to me it was kinda like, take one for the team. Like if this is our studio's last game, it's a good thing because I don't know if the games industry was really worth being in, if that's the case. I live in Victoria [Australia] where there are housing developments going in every direction. You can get a job as a trainee. If I'm blacklisted, well so be it.

This might sound so totally melodramatic, but it's the truth: Indigenous people don't get a second chance ever. If you're a non-indigenous person and you're on an indigenous team and the game doesn't come out, like it fails, it just runs out of money, all the non-Indigenous people, they go up in their careers. Because they've worked with indigenous people. That's what they have on the resume. All the indigenous people go down in their careers because they didn't finish a game.

But it's this whole thing of like they want us to make cultural content 'cause they think that's safe, not realizing that like it's one of the most like it's difficult things to do because what you're essentially asking someone to do is negotiate the copyright of indigenous IP that is owned by so many families but also has a legacy.

I hope with a game like this that it at least gives people a: here's what you should, could, would do.

I find that inspiring. To wrap: Is it fair to say Penguin Colony won’t be available on Xbox?

No. I'll just touch on this: We are not bringing the game to Xbox. The game is also not available in Israel on Steam. I encourage all game developers to do that. You can do that now. Contact Steam directly and tell them you don't want to sell it there. And they will try to tell you not to, but they will allow you to do it. We're not bringing this game to Xbox for the reason you understand. I will just say I think the No Games for Genocide pledge needs to strengthen. Having one boycott is just not enough. There should be Israeli boycotts. There should be encouraging developers to not sell your game on Steam. And I don't think indies should be given an exception, when it comes to holding a strict principled position. I think indies need to be held to the standard of giving enough of a shit about indigenous people. Take one for the team. I'm in no way calling them out or anything like that — I'm just saying there's room for improvement and this is my suggestion. But that's our position. We're not selling the game in Israel. We're not doing Xbox. And we are not making an exception for ourselves. That's how we see it.

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Penguin Colony is out now on Windows PC.