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Holy hell, Pony Island is good. It was barely January when it hit Steam, so I’ve already had to start my list of candidates for “best games of the year”, with it on top.
Pony Island gleefully breaks the 4th wall, and then the 5th and 6th, revealing layers like a very sinister Frog Fractions. People unaware of its history as a Ludum Dare entry, and then as a Greenlight campaign, could be forgiven if they considered it an excellent candidate for Frog Fractions 2 (but that would be a disservice to the actual developer of Pony Island, real person Daniel Mullins).
In Pony Island, you (the you in the game) find yourself in front of an old arcade cabinet, booting up a game from 1992 called Pony Island, a game which resists being played. In fact, just getting past the title screen is your first puzzle. Then there’s the options menu, which, at first, lets you turn off “anti-aliasing” but not “cheerful facade”—a tip-off that you’re just scratching the surface of something.
Beyond the title screen (and the menus, and the loading screen) lies a series of puzzles as well as the actual Pony Island, the game-within-a-game. Some puzzles have you searching through files using the GUI of a retro OS. In other puzzles, you’re hacking around with code and rearranging variables. Then it’s back to that options menu, and deeper down into more advanced options menus that unlock even deeper mysteries.
As you penetrate the game’s layers, alternating between puzzling and unicorning, a plot unfolds that pits you against the Devil himself. That’s not a spoiler, it’s in the official description:
“Pony Island is a suspense puzzle game in disguise. You are in limbo, trapped in a malevolent and malfunctioning arcade machine devised by the devil himself.”
In between puzzles, you keep returning to Pony Island, the action game. At first, it’s a simple autorunner about a jumping unicorn. Then you unlock Pony Lasers, and the game starts to mutate, becoming more violent and demonic. When you finally unlock Adventure Mode, all hell breaks loose (almost literally, heheh).
Luckily, there’s also some other entity inside the game, feeding you hints and cheats and steering you in what seems to be the right direction. Take the help; you’ll need all you can get to beat the devil at his own indie game.
Pony Island (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is $4.99.
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