This is a game where you play as a pretty pink pony frolicking in a green field and jumping over fence posts while butterflies try to tickle it. And someone thought to put this on Steam. For money.
This is Terrible Tuesday where…
Oh wait. It turns out Pony Island is actually the punishment for whatever evil deeds your mortal soul performed, and it’s your goal to escape from this hellish binary nightmare. That sounds a lot better. Guess I’ll type up a proper review.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I clicked on Pony Island’s start button. I knew it wasn’t a game about ponies, unlike what the title was advertising, but it’s hard to discern exactly what it is from trailers and screenshots alone. However if I had to describe the overall Pony Island experience in one adjective, I would call it “Fucked.” It’s like Undertale, The Witness, Her Story and OxenFree had an orgy and no one knows who the kid belongs to, this is my most apt comparison for Pony Island.
You are not a pony. You are a damned soul cursed to your own personal hell. Lucifer, being the gracious host that he is, has provided you with a video game that heaps upon you a ton of false praise each time you clear one of its mundane levels of jumping over pillars and reaching the end goal. You level up rapidly, you get fireworks, you’re told how great you are, it dangles the tasty tasty carrot in front of you. The carrot doesn’t taste very good, and ponies love that shit. The game jumps out its gate with its meta narrative. Video games give you a false pleasure, you may feel cool, but it ultimately means nothing.
Lucifer really wants you to enjoy his game. He wants you to play by the rules. He gets very upset if you cheat. But the only way to win is to hack the shit out of it. Once you’re tired of completing all the mundane levels, it’s time for the real game to start.
What follows is a game full of challenging puzzles and ever rapidly scaling difficulty. You’re going to have to apply some hardcore critical thinking, literally look outside the box, and basically try everything you can think of until you solve Pony Island’s puzzles, be it with skill or in haphazard fashion. When I first turned on Pony Island I kind of expected to burn off a few minutes of time, only to be consumed for a good two hours with the game’s puzzles and narratives.
You interact with two other “characters” over the course of the game using your computer’s text messaging system. These characters include, naturally, your good ol’ boy Lucifer. The other is a “lost soul” who has figured out how to break the hellish Pony Island and escape the game for good. Your goal then becomes uncovering the computer’s three core files using a series of computer hacks, in-game cheats, and braving the perils of Pony Island itself.
Puzzles are a mix of logic tests, maze navigation and quizzing your attentiveness. You’ll find yourself inside Pony Island’s game dev tools screwing around with the code, which requires you insert “icons” that each carry different properties. These icons initially have pretty simple affects, they can either advance your progress or stop you dead in your tracks. Later on you’ll get icons that can “teleport” you around the code. Once you successfully hack the code you’ll receive a predetermined power up for your Pony, such as wings and lasers, you know, pony things. Once you have these power ups you’ll have to play the inevitable Pony Levels, which slowly graduate to a challenging level of bullet hell meant to impede you and test your patience further.
Of course things get pretty… Meta in Pony Island. It already takes place in a “game within the game” computer space. You’ll often find yourself navigating the your terminal’s desktop to interact with the world’s two other inhabitants, launch hack tools and seek out the core files. However late in the game there’s a bit of… Seemingly real world cross over. Well, real digital world crossover. Digital real world? It’s hard to describe, but it makes more sense in context. Think of Slender’s “Crash to Desktop” mechanic or Undertale editing your save file. Yeah. Pony Island goes that deep. I’d rather not spoil the surprise of what exactly happens but it’s pretty good.
Did I mention the rockin’ chiptune soundtrack? Which you can pick up for an additional dollar when you go and grab yourself Pony Island. The relatively simple tracks added a lot to Pony Island’s atmosphere, whether I was trapped in a frustrating cartoon version of Pony Island, locked on the foreboding login screen of damnation, or facing down an epic hell beast boss. The graphics are equally simple but effective. it’s funny how far a bit of black and white and dual tone color can go towards creating a believable hellscape.
Pony Island ate up a good solid two hours of my time, and for completionists Pony Island has plenty of secrets to uncover in the guise of screwing around with menu options and searching for hidden “tickets”, all of which will land you an audience with a special final boss. Of course you’re going to have to keep a soul trapped to do this, and you’re not a monster, are you?
Sometimes big things come in small pony sized packages, and that’s what I got with Pony Island. With its low price point you get plenty of bang for your buck. It’s a tightly designed game, the meta elements work well for it, it has a solid aesthetic and soundtrack and a surprisingly epic finale for being a game all about ponies. It’s one of the best games I’ve played so far this year, and now I must delete it from my hard drive.
