Penguin Colony Launches With Japanese Support, Switch 2 Version Planned

Penguin Colony, the cosmic-horror walking sim from New Zealand’s ORIGAME DIGITAL (the studio behind 2020’s IGF Grand Prize winner Umurangi Generation), launched today on Steam with Japanese language support added to its text options alongside English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Māori.

Set in 1939 Antarctica, Penguin Colony puts players in the feathers of a penguin watching two rival human factions descend into madness as they hunt for an ancient and “inconceivable” being under the South Pole. The game is framed as a faithful re-imagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, narrated by Lenval Brown (Disco Elysium).

Fellow Traveller is the Melbourne-based publisher behind 1000xRESIST, the Citizen Sleeper series, and the recent Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. The studio lists the PC version of Penguin Colony at $14.99 with a 10% launch discount through October 31 ($13.49). The store page flags Switch 2 as a future platform, with the date marked TBA.

Can you play it in Japanese?

Yes. Penguin Colony ships with Japanese as a supported text language on Steam today, and English as the only fully voiced language. The Steam page is also fully translated, including Simplified Chinese. Nintendo’s Switch 2 eShop is not yet showing a Japanese SKU beyond the existing Fellow Traveller catalogue, so Switch 2 players will need to wait for the formal release date announcement.

ORIGAME DIGITAL pitched Penguin Colony as a sincere expansion of Lovecraft’s mythos rather than a parody, a tonal shift from the studio’s photography-game roots in Umurangi Generation. The October launch slots Penguin Colony into the same October-November Switch 2 indie rush that has already shipped Cult of the Lamb on Switch 2 (October 22), Coral Island’s 1.4 update and Switch 2 port (this winter), and PEAK’s multi-platform port (October 22). For Japanese players who missed the English-only Umurangi Generation, this is ORIGAME’s first release with day-one Japanese text support. For Western players waiting on the Switch 2 version, Penguin Colony joins the same queue as PUKEY GODDESS SHOT TRICK, whose Steam page lists English but whose release is Japan-first.

The release also fits the broader Japanese-publisher pattern of Western indies now arriving in the market: Japanese Ramen Simulator crossed 100,000 sales in its first week on Steam worldwide last Friday, and Famitsu’s October 5-11 chart had Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] debut at No. 1 — both signs that the Japanese indie audience is buying more PC and Switch 2 software from international publishers, not just domestic hits.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report