Penguin

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

.

Review:

Penguin is a family-friendly Arcade-style game released in 2026 on Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of a penguin diving for fish to trade for cash to buy upgrades as well as trading for “Arcticdex” characters, with the goal of collecting every Arcticdex character.

The presentation here is mostly pretty good, with charming 2D pixel art visuals. The one exception I’d point to is the chiptune soundtrack, which is repetitive and sounds blaring in a way that gets annoying quickly.

When it comes to the gameplay, you’re moving around underwater trying to catch fish while avoiding predators, then coming back up to trade in your haul, upgrading your abilities, and then repeating the process.

Catching fish is simple and repetitive – you try to catch up with them, and they try to get away from you. The AI is not complicated here. Same goes for the predators, which simply chase you around. There’s no real depth (ha) or nuance here.

Trading in your fish is also pretty tedious. Trading for Arcticdex creatures (I think they’re meant to be Pokemon-esque stuffies?) requires specific combinations, but the trade menu doesn’t show you what you have in inventory, and the stuffies don’t seem to actually do anything other than being collected. And trading for cash requires you to verrrrrrry sloooooowly hold a button down for a second for every fish in your inventory. Catch dozens of fish? Be prepared to sit in one spot repeatedly holding one button for a long while. Buying upgrades takes quite a while too – progression is super-slow. And the upgrades on offer aren’t exactly inspiring, basically amounting to “go faster”, “boost better” and “get better prices for trade-ins”.

The result of all of this is that despite looking visually nice, Penguin is extremely tedious, repetitive, and dull. It’s a shame too, because this had the potential to be one of those meditative experiences where you gradually progress as you improve your abilities, but those abilities are boring, and you get them so slowly that progress feels like it takes forever. This game fails to live up to its potential in multiple ways, and you should absolutely skip it.

tl;dr – Penguin is an Arcade-style game where players take the role of a penguin catching fish and trading them in for upgrades and collectables. Unfortunately, every part of this process is shallow, tedious, slow-paced, and dull. I can absolutely see potential for a better game here, but what we got is something not worth buying.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, Seth Christenfeld, and Vince Verrinoldi. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}