Pony Island

In recent years, there has been a certain subset of games which enjoy taking your expectations, crushing them, and handing you a different experience than you were expecting. There are big-name games which have done this, such as Spec Ops: The Line, or even Black Ops II to an extent; but there have also been smaller games which have done it with varying amounts of success. Some of my personal favourites have included the Giant Bomb sweethearts of IMSCARED - a game which actually writes new files to your computer, and creates a really terrifying atmosphere (I completely recommend that experience) - and Frog Fractions. Pony Island tends to take inspiration from the former.

Pony Island starts as many other indie darlings on Steam - a throwback to a simpler era. It reminds me of an Atari 800 game with its crude visual style, blippy audio, and simple gameplay. The first dozen minutes or so have you playing a runner-type game with some light shooting elements. It's cute, but nothing particularly mindblowing. As the game progresses, you begin to see what can only be described as 'cracks' in the world. As time progresses, the cracks can no longer be avoided, and you are thrown into the true nature of Pony Island. In short, it's the story of Satan, building games to capture your soul. Needless to say, it's not the story you'd expect if you were going in blind.

The deeper you get into the metagame parts of Pony Island, the more the lore of Pony Island's creator Daniel Mullins begins to come into focus. It's a quirky, clever story which has few characters. The characters in play are yourself, the soul of another person trying to help you (or is she?!), and Satan. As you learn more and more about Satan's plan to steal souls, your altruistic friend is helping guide you out of the game by breaking & corrupting Satan's programming. Instead of just the Runner + Shooter gameplay, there are also a number of puzzles that use similar logic to how you would approach simple programming. They use a step-based system where you give the program command such as "skip this line," "repeat here," et cetera.

Truthfully, it is difficult to talk about lots of parts of Pony Island because it is a fairly short experience (about 2 hours from start to finish), all of which is completely single-player. If you're playing it, you're doing so to experience the story on offer. To speak in fairly broad terms, I believe the story is one worth experiencing. The game manages to handle a fairly ambitious tale with decent execution. I compared it to IMSCARED for some very specific reasons, so if you have played that game, I have good news - the best parts of that game are on display in Pony Island. I do have some criticisms, however.

One of the most important parts of a video game is knowing that your players will be playing it - I say this as having designed and developed many games. Though the gameplay is simple in Pony Island, and the game is short, I ended up being quite "done" with playing the game by the end of my time with it. Later on into the game, the metagame programming puzzles never really became difficult, but instead were tedious. This also goes for the last game mechanic it adds near the end. Story-wise, I will also say that the last 15 minutes of the game were fairly underwhelming; but, overall, the experience was so positive that I still had a good time with it.

Pony Island is good. Pony Island isn't great, but it is certainly good. Especially for $5 - when you give it that price tag, I would 100% recommend this game. If it ever goes on sale below that? 150% recommended, in that case! I am excited to see what Daniel Mullins does next, and I hope he is proud of the game he's put out there with Pony Island. It came out of nowhere, and succeeds in a substantial way. If you find yourself with a few hours to spare on a dark night, do yourself a favour and experience Pony Island.