Penguin Colony

That fantasy-horror writer HP Lovecraft was a virulent racist and out-and-proud Anglophile is no longer esoteric knowledge. His writings are peppered with bigoted musings and contemptuous descriptions of Black people and other races, yet despite this his works remain immensely popular due to the existential nightmares they conjure. Many contemporary re-tellings of his stories, like the cottage industry of Lovecraftian videogames, simply choose to avoid his most racist rhetoric, surgically removing the prejudice in his works like cancerous cells from a body. You won’t see any Cthulhu worshippers or prisoners being referred to as "men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type" in these tales, as Lovecraft himself had described some people in The Call of Cthulhu.

Penguin Colony, however, refuses to look away from Lovecraft’s bigotry, with developers Origame Digital reinterpreting one of his novellas through an explicitly anti-colonialist lens. Based on At the Mountains of Madness, it depicts a catastrophic expedition to Antarctica in 1939 by Nazi soldiers (a group Lovecraft himself had some sympathies for), with the tale being chronicled by a British scientist named Howard Blakely. No punches are pulled, no time is wasted; within the game’s opening chapter, a camera pans towards a flag adorned with the Nazi insignia being flown in a base camp. The purpose of the expedition is clearly stated: the group was here to unearth the origins of the so-called Aryan civilization. Following in their footsteps is a Māori faction, who seek to eliminate whatever abomination the Nazis are planning to unleash.