《Penguin Colony》中洛夫克拉夫特的虚构恐怖异常真实

A big takeaway from a lot of HP Lovecraft’s work is that human life and struggles are meaningless, and that really understanding the scale of the universe’s indifference will destroy you. Penguin Colony uses that indifference as a starting point, but rather than coming to the conclusion that it’s better not to know, it ferociously demands that knowing isn’t enough.  

Penguin Colony is the latest game by Origame Digital, the developers of Umurangi Generation. It’s a riff on two Lovecraft stories, “At The Mountains Of Madness” and “The Shadow Out Of Time;” the former is about finding Lovecraft’s standard madness-inspiring horrors in Antarctica, and the latter is about the toll that knowledge of those horrors inflicts on humans who possess it. In the game’s hands, these stories become about a Nazi expedition to Antarctica in 1939 to find a monster believed to be the progenitor of the Aryan race, and a scholar named Howard Blakely–who seems to be unstuck in time, a la “Shadow”--pursuing the same doomed, disturbing quest. 

While many Lovecraft interpretations dance around the author’s racism, here, within minutes, you’re presented with a closeup of a flapping swastika flag–Origame is making no bones about Lovecraft’s whole deal. Beyond the game’s literary inspiration, polar exploration and whiteness have long gone hand in hand, finding a particular home in pseudoscientific theories that the entrance to the hollow Earth is secreted away at the Poles, an inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Pym that’s explicitly mentioned in “Mountains Of Madness.” And more mainstream reasons for going to the Poles–science or business–have always had at their core the motivations of whiteness and empire. While Arctic explorers had to contend with the fact that indigenous people already lived in the places they were “discovering,” the Antarctic, unpopulated by humans, has always been a space where these white explorers could let their colonial imaginations run rampant.

But "unpopulated by humans” doesn’t mean empty. “Mountains Of Madness” notes “seals and whales… [and] great, grotesque penguins.” Penguin Colony seizes on this mention to fill its space with different kinds of penguins, whom the player can inhabit and jump between to traverse the frozen landscape and watch the Nazis meet their doom at the tentacles of Lovecraft’s monsters.

This article contains spoilers for Penguin Colony.

While the Nazis go crazy and kill each other and battle eldritch horrors, the penguins just putter around doing penguin stuff. It’s surreal to come across a group of Nazis standing before some twisted structure deep in the ice, which they respond to by falling to their knees or shooting themselves in the head, and just waddle past them on your penguin business. As a penguin, you can jump and swim and slide on your belly, and different penguins excel at different things. Babies can’t swim, but they’re small enough to squeeze through cracks to get to new areas; heavier penguins can press buttons to use elevators or open passages. My favorite penguin was the Rockhopper, which can jump higher and climb steeper surfaces than all the others, a boost that felt necessary for me to traverse the game’s landscape.

I often found that landscape baffling and easy to get lost in, especially in pursuit of the collectibles scattered around. There’s more than you can possibly find; the game keeps track of them at the end, and Origame explicitly urges players in an in-game note to work together to unlock them all. (Developer Naphtali Faulkner said in a talk at this year’s LudoNarraCon that “to me, the worst way you could play Penguin Colony is 100% it.”) Some collectibles are photographs that unlock snippets of story; others are words in English or Māori that the penguins learn from their human interlopers. These latter ones increase your penguins’ stamina, indicated by a needlessly large meter. I’ll be honest that stamina never really came into play for me, nor did switching penguins much; more often than not I was able to brute force my way to wherever I wanted to go by finding an alternate route or by exploiting the game’s somewhat janky physics and geometry. 

But this also meant I spent a lot of the game hopelessly lost, trying to follow marked pathways the Nazis have left or, as the game suggests, the direction of the wind. (This also meant that, more than a few times, I fell off the map or got myself stuck, though there’s a button to reset your position.) I spent so long wandering and backtracking in the game’s second chapter that I eventually restarted the chapter to try again. The game went better for me once I let go of both the idea that there was some ideal route to follow and the need to try to pursue every collectible, instead moving through the landscape at a whim until I triggered the next chapter of the game. Later areas felt easier to navigate, even as the game’s landscape grew bigger and creepier.

Beyond playing a penguin being an interesting hook for a Lovecraft game, this design decision is a key part of what Penguin Colony is trying to say. At first, as a horror game coward, being a penguin gave me a sense of safety that made the game’s scary moments less scary. You can be killed, but you just switch to the body of one of the other hundreds of penguins huddled around, so even times when I was actively in danger became trivial. And you’re just an observer to the game’s story, unable to help or hinder the Nazis, which keeps you at a remove from what’s going on.

For a long time, I really liked all this, because it made the Nazis and their ideologies feel small and meaningless against the scale of the Antarctic and the motivations of nature. But as the game’s themes become clear, this role of observer gets turned around on you. There are human characters who are trying to stop the Nazis, a band of Māori warriors you nominally control, but as a penguin you don’t concern yourself with that either. Being an observer to the Nazis means you aren’t doing anything about them–not trying to stop them from spreading across the globe, simply watching passively as Blakely attempts to awaken a world-ending horror. There’s that sense of distance–you’re just a penguin, after all–but of course you’re not really a penguin, you’re a human playing a video game.

Penguin Colony doesn’t pull some Spec Ops: The Line trick of blaming you for playing it. Rather, it slowly seeds the real world into its narrative until its whole metaphor becomes clear, an unfolding that echoes its explorers’ realizations about what they’ve found in the ice. Broadly, it’s looking at colonialism and the racism and myth-making inherent to it, but it also has its sights set clearly on Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and especially the games industry’s response. A note in the closing credits reads “The cowardice of the Games Industry during the ongoing genocide of Palestine by Israel will be recorded by the art it makes.” And according to a Steam post by publisher Fellow Traveller, “the developer asked us to block sale [of the game] in Israel. In the absence of more organized sanctions, this act is intended to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine. We fully support their decision.”

In his LudoNarraCon talk, Faulkner said, “When this is asked about in the future, and musicians are asked what they did, they'll say, ‘We made music because we're musicians.’ They'll ask filmmakers and they'll say, ‘Well, we were filmmakers, so we made films.’ And then they'll say, ‘And what about you, game developers?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, we were game developers, so we made excuses.’”

The real horror at the heart of Penguin Colony is the ideology that inspired Lovecraft to his work in the first place, and the way that it spreads not just through its adherents today, but through people who don’t do everything in their power to stop it. “Who will next find themselves drawn to [the monster’s] voice–mesmerised by the promise of wealth and land?” a Māori warrior asks. “Which Europeans will be seduced into seeing themselves as his offspring? And who will take up arms to stop them?” 

The penguins, then, embody ways we as humans often respond to the violence and oppression going on around us. We tell ourselves it isn’t our problem; we think there’s nothing we can do; we conflate witness or doomscrolling or words with action. Penguin Colony could be read as calling people to hands-on or violent action in response, but it could also be a reminder that any action is better than nothing. The colonial project, wherever it rears its head, demands active resistance, not silent witness and justifications.

Faulkner has also said the game is inspired by the Souls games, in particular group secret-finding, and this nudge to bring players together also ties back to its themes. You can’t just watch bad stuff happen, but you also can’t do much about it on your own. Just as you have to return to the penguin colony to find a new penguin to progress through the game, or talk to other players to parse all its secrets, you have to join with others to face what’s happening in the real world.

Penguin Colony is a twist on so many things that video games do, from the actions it lets you take to how you relate to the game’s story to the way it uses its Lovecraft inspiration. The sense of dawning realization that unfolds throughout the game echoes the arc of Lovecraft’s characters, but rather than coming to the conclusion much of the author’s work does that it’s better not to know, the game seems to say that you already know–now it’s time to act.