Penguin Fury Hands-On: A Tough, Charming Roguelite Worth Your Next Fest Time
- How we played: Game Empress played a pre-release build of Penguin Fury on a Windows 11 PC on Oct.
- My first runs in Penguin Fury lasted a minute or two.
- Penguin Fury is developed and published by exklusiva.
How we played: Game Empress played a pre-release build of Penguin Fury on a Windows 11 PC on Oct. 10, 2026, using a Steam key provided by the developer. Steam logged 116 minutes of play. Every screenshot in this article is from that session. The developer did not see this article before publication.
My first runs in Penguin Fury lasted a minute or two. By the end of almost two hours, the game’s counter showed 27 deaths and no wins, and I was still clicking “play again.” That pull is the best thing about this roguelite auto-battler, which comes to Steam on Nov. 6, 2026.
Penguin Fury is developed and published by exklusiva. You draft a squad of penguins, arm them and drop them into an icy arena that sends seals at you in waves. The penguins aim and fire on their own, so your job is the thinking: which penguins to recruit, which upgrades to take and when to spend.
My session in numbers
- Play time: 116 minutes, according to Steam
- Deaths: 27, with no wins
- Furthest wave: 3
- Best combo: 34x, the UNSTOPPABLE tier
- Penguins recruited: more than 100
- Seals defeated: more than 500
- Steam achievements: at least 10 of 100, including my first two-star merge
Before the first wave
Each run starts with two choices. Clicking Mode switches it from Normal to an Adventure called Thin Ice, and the archetype I played with was Balanced. The main menu also has a Blue Box, which sets goals that pay out rewards, so there is something to chase even on a run that goes badly.
And early on, most runs do go badly. You start with three hearts, enemies arrive in big rushes from the second wave, and by the third a red seal throws spears that mark red zones on the ground. Standing in one ends the run. My best run reached the third wave.
Why losing never felt like wasted time
The death screen is where Penguin Fury keeps you hooked. It shows how long you survived, your kills, your best combo and which penguins did the damage. Two of my early runs show how much the squad changes from one attempt to the next:
| Run | Survived | Kills | Best combo | Damage by penguin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early run A | 1:00 | 34 | 12x | Wizard 290, Rifleman 275, Brawler 83 |
| Early run B (above) | 1:32 | 38 | 10x | Lightning Caller 418, Bombardier 187 |
Every death also pays out KrillCoin, which you spend on permanent upgrades such as extra starting coins, more health, faster attacks and extra Joker slots. Even my shortest runs moved me a little closer to a stronger squad, and that is why “one more run” kept winning.
A squad that grows with you
The penguins come in clear roles, including the Rifleman, Wizard, Lightning Caller, Bombardier and Brawler, and ranged units were the backbone of my best runs. Over the session I recruited more than 100 penguins and took down more than 500 seals.
Kills chain into combos, and the screen lights up as they climb. The Steam page lists combo tiers from FRENZY at five kills to LEGENDARY at 90. My best was a 34x combo, which lands in the UNSTOPPABLE tier. Watching a full line of penguins clear a wave is the moment the game clicks.
New systems arrive run by run
Penguin Fury doesn’t hand you everything at once. After one early death, the end screen told me Merge would unlock after one more run. Early in my session I had seen “New system unlocked” cards for Unit Merge, Passive Gear, Evolutions, Arcana Cards, which let you pick a run modifier, and Jokers, relics you buy with fish to stack big multipliers.
Merging took me the longest
The Unit Merge card explains the idea well: three of the same penguin, across your team and bench, fuse into a stronger starred unit, up to three stars. Doing it mid-run was harder. Spare penguins wait on a bench marked “MERGE 0/6” below the shop, and when I lined up a merge in the middle of a fight, my squad didn’t always react as fast as I wanted.
Choosing who to merge was harder still. In my build, hovering over a penguin in the shop made it wiggle, but I didn’t see its stats or ability, so I learned each role by trying it.
It clicked late in my session, when I forged my first two-star penguin.
We asked the developer
After my session, I sent exklusiva, the game’s solo developer, three questions and a short bug report. Here is what they told Game Empress.
Merge, Passive Gear, Evolutions, Arcana and Jokers all unlock early. Is a slower first run or a practice mode planned?
The pacing is deliberate. Merge unlocks first, followed by Passive Gear and Evolutions, then Arcana and Jokers, over multiple completed runs, “to give players new systems to discover as they continue playing.” There is no separate practice mode to announce for now.
The Steam page lists adjustable difficulty, but I couldn’t find it in Options. Where is it?
“Difficulty is handled through the game’s unlockable Danger/Fury tiers rather than a setting in the Options menu,” so players move to higher difficulty as they progress. The developer added that they will review how the feature is described on Steam.
Hovering over a penguin in the shop didn’t show its stats or ability. Are tooltips planned?
The shop does have hover-based information, the developer says, and they will take a closer look at how players reach each penguin’s stats and abilities.
Bug report: the game once left full screen and paused briefly.
The developer said they will investigate the window-mode behavior and check whether the pause was tied to an interface transition, but can’t confirm the cause yet.
Five tips from 27 deaths
- Buy three of the same penguin. Merges happen on their own once you have three matching units across your team and bench. Mixed penguins won’t fuse.
- Lean on ranged units. In my runs, the Wizard, Rifleman and Lightning Caller did most of the damage.
- Watch the ground from wave three. The red seal’s spears mark red zones, and standing in one ends the run.
- Line up merges when the screen is calm. Mid-fight, my squad was slow to react while I set one up.
- Spend KrillCoin after every death. Even a 92-second run paid out, and permanent upgrades add up quickly.
How it ran on my PC
I played on an Intel Core i9 (14th gen) PC with 48GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, and the game didn’t crash once. It mostly ran smoothly. In my later runs it paused briefly once, and at one point it left full screen and shrank into a corner of the monitor as a run began. The Options menu has few settings for now.
I reported both issues to the developer, who is looking into them. The listed minimum is far lower than my PC: a dual-core 2.0GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and 1GB of storage.
Worth a spot on your Next Fest list
Penguin Fury already gets the hardest part of a roguelite right: it makes you want one more run. It is packed with systems for a small game, it has 100 Steam achievements to work toward (I unlocked at least 10 in my session), and its penguins have charm. Clearer unit information would make it an easy recommendation at its price.
Streamers may want a closer look. According to the Steam page, Twitch and Kick viewers can type !join to claim a seal on the field, or !claim to take ownership of a penguin the streamer buys, and every hit earns them fish. I didn’t test this feature.
The game is part of Steam Next Fest from Oct. 19 to 26 and launches on Nov. 6, 2026, for $5.99, with a 20% discount for its first 14 days, according to the developer. That’s later than first planned: the developer’s August press release had set a Sept. 4 launch. A demo is available now on Steam.
Update, Oct. 11, 2026: This article now includes the developer’s answers to our questions, our session numbers, beginner tips and more screenshots from our playthrough.
