Image credit: Fellow Traveler / Rock Paper Shotgun

Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp.

Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word "sex". I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk.…