The cowardice of the Games Industry, say the credits of a penguin game

Penguin Colony, a horror game in which players guide penguins through a Nazi expedition in 1939 Antarctica ^[2][5], cannot be bought in Israel ^[4], and its closing credits accuse the games industry of cowardice over Palestine ^[1].

The game was made by Origame Digital, the studio behind the 2020 photography game Umurangi Generation ^[1][2], and published by Fellow Traveller. It came out on October 16, 2026, on PC through Steam, GOG and the Humble Store. ^[5]

The Israel restriction was made at the developer's request, according to Kotaku, which reproduced a response from Fellow Traveller in a Steam forum thread. The publisher said the block was meant to show solidarity with Palestine in the absence of more organised sanctions, and that it supports the developer's decision. ^[4]

What the credits say

The game's last words are aimed at its own business. The closing credits read: "The cowardice of the Games Industry during the ongoing genocide of Palestine by Israel will be recorded by the art it makes." ^[1]

That is the studio's charge, and it uses the word genocide in its own voice. Checkpoint Gaming, in an interview with the game's director, reports that a United Nations commission found Israel's killing of Palestinians in the region amounted to genocide. The paper has not read the commission's report. ^[2]

The game opens on a different register. It begins with Aboriginal land acknowledgements and says it was made on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung land. ^[1]

Cute on purpose

The story reworks H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness. Players control penguins while a Nazi expedition hunts for an ancient city and a group called the Kaitiaki tries to stop an ancient force from waking. ^[2][5]

The penguins waddle and behave comically, and that is the design. Director Naphtali Faulkner calls the inviting style "camouflage": players get invested, then are confronted with violence and politics, and are left to reflect on the moment they are living through. ^[2]

Lovecraft is a pointed choice of raw material. Faulkner says the cosmic horror in the original, with its dehumanisation and its indifference to killing, echoes colonial violence. The game leaves the Lovecraft canon unchanged, he says, but shifts the focus so the narrator is not trusted and Indigenous characters are not treated as mad. ^[2][3]

It is an old trick, to hide a hard argument inside a gentle surface. Fairy tales have done it for centuries. The difference here is that the argument does not stay inside the fiction. It carries on through the credits and into the sales settings.

The sales decision

Studios put politics into games all the time. Fewer put them into a storefront setting, where the cost is real.

What that cost is, nobody has said. No sales figures, revenue projections or estimates of what the Israel block might lose have been published, and nothing shows it has affected any platform deal. Nor is it clear whether the restriction covers every storefront or what prompted it.

The studio's stated motive is solidarity. Nothing on record supports calling it a marketing play, and nothing documents a commercial penalty.

What the record does show is a decision made on principle and announced on the publisher's own account. That is the part a reader can weigh.

The silence

Faulkner's larger target is the industry around him. He says games companies avoid political work because it might be difficult or unprofitable. He calls the limits they respect "paper walls" and says companies honour them because they do not want to miss out on a Game Pass deal. ^[2]

Game Pass is Microsoft's subscription service for Xbox and PC. The interview links his comments to a BDS campaign, which calls for a boycott of Xbox to pressure Microsoft over its ties to Israel. Faulkner's own line on the matter is blunt: "You either support an apartheid or you don't and there's no in-between." ^[2]

No one has counted how many games companies have spoken about Palestine, so the claim that the industry is unusually silent is his argument, not a measurement. The examples in reporting are modest but telling. Kotaku recalls an open letter from members of the Game Awards' Future Class that was ignored. It also recalls the studio House House, which decided not to release its game Big Walk on Xbox in support of BDS. ^[4]

Two precedents do not make a movement. They do suggest how small the field of public action is, and how a studio that acts, and says why, stands out. Faulkner's own phrase is a fair measure of that. A wall of paper stops people only as long as nobody leans on it.

Rock Paper Shotgun has speculated that the game may not appear on Xbox. That is a guess, not something the publisher has said. ^[1]

The credits promise that the industry's choices "will be recorded by the art it makes." Whether other studios answer, and whether platforms respond, is the next thing to watch. So far neither has done so on the record.