Penguin City review
Yggdrasil released Penguin City on 24 July 2018. Five reels by three rows, wins in all ways, and a story with a fearsome Emperor keeping penguin slaves in his food emporium. The heart of the game is Penguin Escape Mode: a sticky Wild, a chain of respins and a stack of Emperor Wilds.
A red evening in a night market
The backdrop shows a narrow night-market street under a dark red sky. Stalls with burgers, green snacks and crates of oranges flank the lane, while red paper lanterns glow overhead and lamps hang from poles. At the far end stands a stone gate with a tiled roof, and in its bright opening three small silhouettes that look like penguins are walking away.
The story reads without words: escapees on the threshold of freedom, with the market where they were made to work left behind. The tone is jokey rather than scary, even if the red palette looks uneasy. Such a look promises a light game, which fits the low-volatility label.
What Yggdrasil states and what comes from the configuration
On the game page the studio gives the type as “video slot, collections”, lists a 96.2% RTP, low volatility and a maximum win of €205,875, and names three features: Penguin Escape Mode, Stacked Emperor Wild and Wilds. Hit frequency, the frequency of the mode itself and a pay table are not on the page. Every other number comes from the settings file that the studio’s server hands out for the demo game, and the studio does not publish those figures. The demo launches on the Yggdrasil server without registration, but in some countries it may be unavailable.
In the configuration the stake equals 25 coins, and the coin value is chosen from 18 euro values, from €0.004 to €5, which gives a range of €0.10 to €125. The MaxExposure parameter is 1,647, and at the top stake of €125 that comes to exactly the €205,875 from the game sheet. So the euro figure applies only at the maximum stake; at any other stake the ceiling is 1,647 bets.
Why a “low” label sits next to such a ceiling
The studio label and the euro figure seem to argue at first glance, but measured in bets the ceiling is moderate: upper limits in the hundreds of thousands of bets show up in high-volatility games. So in terms of volatility the slot really is closer to a steady flow of payouts than to hunting for a rare result. Fifteen cells plus a respin mode create a steady trickle of small payouts, and the “surges” come from series rather than a single symbol.
Win all ways: how many paths that is
The official wording is simply “win all ways”. The number of ways follows from the layout: a window three cells tall across five reels gives three to the fifth power, that is 243 paths. A payout counts when matching symbols run left to right on adjacent reels, and each row combination is counted separately.
So one spin often brings several wins through a repeated symbol on the same reel. This is what sets the format apart from line slots: what matters is not the row where a symbol sits but whether it is present on each of the consecutive reels. A Wild is especially valuable in such a system, since one symbol closes several paths at once.
Nine symbols and what they pay for three, four and five
The settings file lists the payouts of nine ordinary symbols for combinations of three, four and five. The numbers are written in coins against a 25-coin stake, so dividing by 25 gives a share of the stake. The file carries no pictures, and the symbols are told apart by the number in the configuration: five high and four low.
| Symbol | 3 in a row | 4 in a row | 5 in a row | 5 as a share of the stake |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High 1 | 25 | 50 | 250 | 10x |
| High 2 | 20 | 40 | 200 | 8x |
| High 3 | 15 | 35 | 150 | 6x |
| High 4 | 10 | 25 | 125 | 5x |
| High 5 | 10 | 25 | 100 | 4x |
| Low 1 | 5 | 15 | 70 | 2.8x |
| Low 2 | 5 | 15 | 60 | 2.4x |
| Low 3 | 5 | 10 | 55 | 2.2x |
| Low 4 | 5 | 10 | 50 | 2x |
The payouts are calm: the highest for a single path is ten bets, and the gap between the top and bottom symbols is only fivefold. That agrees with the studio label. But there are many paths, and amounts from different paths add up, so the total of a spin can be noticeably larger than a number from the table.
The reel strips and the chance of seeing a Wild
The strips are uneven: the first reel has 89 positions, the second and fourth 217 each, the third only 54 and the fifth 64, with high symbols making up 45, 48, 67, 48 and 64% of them respectively. In the base game the Wild appears only on the second and fourth reels, five per strip. That matches the studio description: the mode starts from a Wild on exactly those reels. Together the five strips give about 14.5 billion positions.
A three-cell window catches at least one of the five Wilds on a 217-position strip in about 6.9% of spins (15 of 217), and across the two reels that is around 13% of spins. The strip calculation is exact, but Penguin Escape Mode itself starts noticeably less often: a Wild must land first, and then the spin must also win. Those two conditions make it clear the mode comes less often than once in ten spins. The balance makes sense: the mode rewards a run, not a single appearance.
Penguin Escape Mode: a sticky Wild and respins to the first blank
When a Wild shows up on the second or fourth reel in a winning spin, the game switches to escape mode. That Wild becomes sticky for the whole mode. Respins continue until a spin without a win occurs: there is no fixed counter, so the length of the run depends on whether each next spin wins.
During the mode, on every respin the penguins may bring one of two gifts: an extra sticky Wild on the second or fourth reel, or a winning symbol on the third. The mode thus feeds itself: a sticky Wild nearly guarantees a continuation, and the gifts add to it. The principle recalls the classic respins in Starburst, where the Wild is also pinned to a reel.
The studio does not give the win probability on a respin. Sticky Wilds push it above the base-game level, and it drives the length of the run far more than the size of payouts: if every respin wins with the same chance q, a run averages q / (1 – q) winning respins, which is one at 50% and four at 80%.
How a sticky Wild works on the paths
A Wild on the second reel covers one of the three cells. In all-ways payouts it replaces the symbol in that cell for any combination passing through the second reel. So if a high symbol sits on the first reel and another on the third, the Wild on the second lets them connect. When the Wild stays put for the whole mode, those links apply on every respin.
Two sticky Wilds on the second and fourth reels work together: every five-reel chain gets two ready-made links, and a payout needs only matches on the first, third and fifth. The penguins’ gifts on the third reel add another link. A run with two Wilds is usually noticeably longer than a run with one.
The third reel in escape mode: a different strip
The configuration provides a separate set of strips for the mode, and on the third reel the strip grows from 54 to 188 positions. The makeup changes noticeably:
| Symbol on the third reel | Base, % | Escape mode, % |
|---|---|---|
| High 1 | 7.4 | 4.3 |
| High 2 | 20.4 | 25.0 |
| High 3 | 7.4 | 8.5 |
| High 4 | 11.1 | 2.1 |
| High 5 | 20.4 | 23.4 |
| Low 3 | 24.1 | 25.5 |
| Emperor Wild | 0 | 1.6 |
The share of the priciest symbol on this reel falls in the mode, while middle symbols become noticeably more frequent. So the value of the mode is created not by rare expensive pictures but by sticky Wilds and steady payouts of middle symbols. That confirms the general character of the slot: stability ranks above sensation.
Stacked Emperor Wild: a stack that creeps downward
The mode strip on the third reel holds a block of three consecutive Emperor Wild positions. The studio description says such a stack shifts one row down on every spin and practically guarantees respins until it leaves the reels. On a three-cell window that means several respins in a row, but the stack is not always visible whole: as it moves, part of it leaves the grid.
The chance of seeing at least part of the stack in the window on a respin is about 2.7% by the configuration (three in a row on a 188-position strip). That looks modest, but over a run of respins the chance of meeting it grows. Exactly how the stack enters the grid and how many spins it stays depends on its position, and the documents name no exact number.
Should Penguin City be compared with Butterfly Staxx
The closest slot in spirit is Butterfly Staxx from NetEnt: also low volatility, respins and pinned symbols. Its RTP is 96.8% and its cap 300x, while Penguin City’s cap is more than five times higher at an RTP 0.6 points lower.
So with a similar temperament the choice comes down to price: Butterfly Staxx returns slightly more, Penguin City offers more room at the top. The comparison is loose because the mechanics differ: the penguins build a run on sticky Wilds, while the butterflies work with shifting stacks.
