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Much like the H.P. Lovecraft novella it alternately riffs on and skewers, Penguin Colony takes you to an ancient alien city of crabby cuboid geometry and helical designs – comparable at a glance to Lovecraft's "terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion", but here given strangely everyday, anachronistic-seeming labels, such as "Downtown". Later, you're shown flashes of footage of the streets of Melbourne in Australia - developer Origame Digital's base of operations, and a city built on stolen Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung land.
When I first set foot in Downtown, in the unassuming body of a Rockhopper penguin, I thought the broad idea was to satirically redefine modern settlements built by European colonisers as Lovecraftian relics, intrusions from the cosmic beyond. This irony seems most pointed in sections where you steer a group of Māori characters, journeying south to prevent an expedition of German and British Nazi occultists from resurrecting a surviving elder being they call the "one true Aryan king". Playing as one of the Māori voyagers, you witness the cyclopean city as a realm of spectral high rises and square windows, rearing out of a swamp of blood and bone.
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