How Club Penguin Came Back As a Horrifying Blood Sport
Club Penguin was an idyllic place to waste your time. It was always either a gorgeous sunny day or a brisk cloudless night. Snowcap mountains towered over the distant horizon, bright yuletide storefronts lined the streets, and players found a nation of cheerful, polychrome penguins greeting them at every corner. They logged on to chill in gaudy igloo manors before scampering off with friends to play a variety of simple, Flash-based mini-games. Club Penguin was free-to-play and available on even the most primitive PC specs. You could do a lot worse on a Tuesday afternoon.
Every month, the developers threw a dance party in the central square; it didn't matter if it was Halloween, Christmas, or that listless part of April — there was always something worth celebrating in this dimension. Disney famously enforced stringent child-safety regimens on Club Penguin after acquiring it in 2007, and that gave the MMO a unique tension-free ambiance. There was no looming threat imperiling this world; no monsters to hunt, or invaders to push back. The game was designed purely as a place for children to hang out after school, and it stayed that way until March 30, 2017, when after 12 years the servers finally went dead. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/18/club-penguin-e-sex-might-have-caused-fan-server-shutdown-ign-daily-fix"] But now, three years later, something rumbles on the dormant island. In a remote corner of the internet, far from its original server, a penguin named "Agent" awakens in the long-abandoned Club. No one else is there, save for a few woozy stragglers who've survived whatever extinction event that has decimated their once-thriving arctic paradise. "[They're] quickly forced into a death game by an evil polar bear named Monobert. He explains that all of the other penguins have been transported to a new world so that he can take over Club Penguin with no one to stop him," says Tofu, pen name of the 18-year old author behind the ongoing visual novel Penguinronpa. "The penguins left on the island were mysteriously unaffected by this, and Monobert proposes that, in order to escape the island and reunite with the other penguins, they have to kill each other and get away with it. It's not long before paranoia sets in, and well, I'll let you find out what happens for yourself." There have been dozens of different fan tributes to Club Penguin since the game was discontinued. Most of them settle on a feeling of displaced nostalgia; young people yearning for a time when they were even younger and life was much simpler. But Tofu, and Penguinronpa, stand out from the crowd by their sheer chaotic chutzpah. As you might glean from its name, Tofu's visual novel is a thematic mashup of both Club Penguin and the Danganronpa franchise. If you're unfamiliar with Danganronpa, think of it as a cross between Battle Royale and Persona — a gripping, dread-sick adventure-serial where effete high schoolers are forced to murder each other to curry favor with a possessed chibi teddy bear. Adapting that narrative to a free-to-play Disney MMO, full of cheerful talking penguins belly-sliding down arctic glaciers, requires a significant shift in tone. And yet, Tofu is already on the fourth chapter – and the fate of these good penguins hangs in the balance.
How Club Penguin Came Back As a Horrifying Blood Sport
Reviewed by Unknown
on
November 02, 2020
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