Māori Developer Weaponizes Lovecraft Against Colonial Myth-Making in Penguin Game

Naphtali Faulkner, a Māori developer working out of Melbourne, has built a game around a simple, absurd image: penguins waddling across Antarctic ice while Nazi expeditions collapse into cosmic madness around them. The penguins don't care. They slide on their bellies, spin like Mario, slip through crevices. The Nazis, meanwhile, are tearing themselves apart searching for relics to prove Aryan supremacy, only to stumble upon the unknowable creatures from H.P. Lovecraft's 1930s novella At the Mountains of Madness—which they mistake for an ancient Aryan king. The game is called Penguin Colony, and it is, by design, tonal chaos.

But the chaos is the point. Faulkner, working with Origame Digital, has weaponized that dissonance to interrogate how colonial powers manufacture history. He points to Celtic New Zealand, a pseudoscientific alternate history claiming Anglo settlers arrived before Māori populations—a fabrication with real consequences. He sees the same machinery at work in Australia's origin story. The game's narrative, delivered in fragmentary vignettes, traces how colonizers construct false pasts, how they layer assumption upon assumption until the lie becomes doctrine. The penguins, indifferent and alive, become the counterweight to that machinery.

There is something deliberately provocative about building this critique atop Lovecraft's work. The American author, creator of Cthulhu and the cosmic horror genre, was a notorious racist. His stories are saturated with xenophobia—his depictions of Indigenous populations, his subservient slave races like the Shoggoths, his assumption that white characters alone possess the capacity to understand the world. Most game adaptations of Lovecraft sidestep this entirely, focusing on gore and tentacles and visual strangeness. Faulkner refuses that evasion. "The scariest thing about Lovecraft," he says, "is how it makes assumptions about things and all the white characters just nod along with it." He is not excising Lovecraft's racism; he is centering it, making it the actual subject of interrogation.

This approach reflects what Faulkner calls an Indigenous framework for game design—one that rejects what he terms "human-centred Silicon Valley design," the dominant mode that delivers unchallenging content in neat, quantified packages. He draws on Wiradjuri professor Norman Sheehan's concept of "respectful design," which holds that knowledge is not generated inside the individual mind but absorbed from the world outside it. In Penguin Colony, this manifests as deliberate opacity. Collectibles are not clearly marked or counted. The narrative is partly missable. Players discover objects by following the direction of the wind—a choice that resurrects the mystery video games once held before social media made every secret discoverable within hours.

Faulkner recalls playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when players worldwide hunted for Bigfoot across its 36-square-kilometre map, following a trail that led nowhere. They were wrong, but the search itself became the experience. "It's a very Lovecraftian idea," he says. Most Lovecraftian stories center an academic or researcher uncovering an eldritch truth and struggling to comprehend it. That struggle cannot be gamified with stats and numbers; it requires players to inhabit the role outside the game's formal systems. Faulkner draws inspiration from FromSoftware's approach—the Dark Souls series, Elden Ring—where difficulty, complexity, and obscure storytelling force communities to work together to decipher meaning. He wants Penguin Colony to challenge players in unfamiliar ways, to spark the kind of enduring debates those games generate, without the punishing difficulty.

For Faulkner, video games remain an emerging art form, still captured by commercial American sensibilities that have not yet allowed the medium to reach its potential. Penguin Colony is an attempt to break that hold—to show that a game can be strange, fragmentary, and demanding without being hostile; that it can center Indigenous design principles without abandoning accessibility; that it can reclaim Lovecraft's own tools to dismantle the colonial myth-making his work helped normalize. The penguins will keep waddling. The Nazis will keep searching for false histories. And players, if they pay attention, might begin to see the machinery that makes such fabrications possible.