“Noot noot” means “VR” in Penguin
Ex-Owlchemy Labs dev Zi Ye has announced a new indie VR game—Penguin Festival. Melding the easy-breezy vibes of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with the satisfying interactivity of Job Simulator, Penguin Festival will invite players into a chill penguin town as its inhabitants prepare for a yearly night festival.
Penguin Festival will be a single-player VR adventure game focused on putting the player at the center of both festival preparations and enjoyment! As a fellow penguin, the player will help the local community of penguins with some final touches for the festival. All work and no play would make it feel like a job though, so the player will have the freedom to explore and have fun with other activities in-between the last-minute prep.
Features:
- Freely explore an inviting penguin town on the ocean.
- Interact with a colorful cast of characters with no relationship mechanics to stress you out.
- Help out with a medley of to-dos—through immersive, physics-based VR mechanics!
- Take breaks from festival prep with activities like fishing or snowball fights.
- Savor the fruits of your labor at the nighttime festivities filled with games and music!
- Play at your own pace with no time pressure.
- Standing and seated play styles will be supported.
- Different comfort options will be available, such as locomotion/teleportation.
- Fun to play; fun to watch—third-person spectator camera makes it easy to share your VR silliness and fun with friends and family!
Overall, Penguin Festival aims to provide VR players somewhere that is immediately welcoming and invites the player to enjoy their time. Such a goal will be supported by providing those “juicy” interactions every VR player craves and expects from their VR experiences.
“My wish for this game is to take players to a world they will be happy to be a part of—somewhere where they feel welcome, at peace, and free to just be,” expresses Zi Ye, former Expert Engineer at Owlchemy Labs and now developer of Penguin Festival. “I want to give the player freedom to interact with the VR world on their own terms, without asking them to invent their own fun. Rather than making a playground, I want to create a place that has a voice and a heartbeat of its own.”
Zi honed his VR development skills at Owlchemy Labs for eight years working on acclaimed VR games such as Job Simulator and Rick & Morty: Virtual Rickality. Penguin Festival is his first venture into the indie VR scene since leaving Owlchemy and will be self-published under the company name Cozy Cube Games.
Development of Penguin Festival has been documented publicly by Zi on Twitter and now Bluesky. He continues to post about the playful penguin interactions he’s working on and ones that players can look forward to in the game. Zi also posts about the Godot Engine ever since switching over to the open-source game engine for Penguin Festival’s development and becoming a contributor.
Penguin Festival is set to come out on Quest 2, Quest 3 and PC VR. A release date has yet to be set, but the game can be wishlisted on Steam right now.
Follow Cozy Cube Games on Bluesky or visit the website to keep up with every waddle of the Penguin Festival development.
