Penguin Games

Endless waddles and slides with the seal close behind.

Penguin Run Adventure Game

Icicle Run

Penguin Fish Run

Penguin Fish Run-3

Penguin Run

Run Pen

A bird that cannot fly but can slide

The penguin is a mascot before it is a genre. What the games share is a setting — ice, snow, dark water and the occasional polar bear — and a character that waddles, slides and flaps rather than runs. The typical shelf entry is a small, bright game you finish in a few minutes: a launch game where you time the belly slide for distance, a platformer with slippery floors, a fishing minigame under the ice, a hopping game across drifting floes, or a cafe where the penguin serves fish to impatient customers.

Because the character is friendly and the games are short, the shelf overlaps heavily with animal games and the wider bird games hub, and most of it would also sit comfortably under kids games. The point of listing them together is simple: if a child asks for a penguin, this is where every penguin in the catalog lives.

Categories:Animal

Tap, swipe or the arrow keys

The launch and slide games use one input — tap or click at the right moment to start the slide, then again to keep it going — which is why they work so well on a phone. The platformer games end of the shelf uses the arrow keys and a jump on a desktop and on-screen buttons on mobile, with the extra wrinkle that ice makes the penguin skid past the edge if you are not careful. That slipperiness is the genre's one real mechanic, and the better levels are built around it.

The cafe and diner titles borrow their rules from cooking games: customers arrive, you tap to take an order, tap to serve, and the trick is keeping everyone fed before the patience meter empties. They play with a mouse or a finger equally well. If you want the same easy pace without the bird, the casual games hub is the broader version of this shelf.

Categories:PlatformerCookingCasual

Who these are for

Mostly children, and mostly the younger ones. There is no violence beyond a seal snapping at the penguin, the controls are a tap or two, and a level rarely lasts longer than a young attention span. Adults use the shelf for the same reason people keep a penguin plush on a desk: it is calming, and the slide games have a satisfying arc to them. Expect cheerful music, big buttons and a fair amount of snow.

If it is the setting rather than the bird you are after, the snow games hub has skiing, sledding and snowball fights, and the christmas games shelf brings the same white landscape with a seasonal theme. For quick score-chasing with a penguin or without, arcade games is the next stop.

Categories:ChristmasArcade