[REVIEW] Pony Island

 With the Canadian-made Pony Island being a game that’s been out for a few years now, it’s no surprise to anyone at this point that the game isn’t as cutesy and charming as the title suggests. But despite knowing that, until recently I hadn’t really sat down to play it and fully experience it for myself. Now that I’ve done so, though, it’s to my regret that I didn’t do so sooner.

 

Pony Island is a game with fantastically simple controls. Most of the game can be played with left or right mouse clicks, combined with occasional moments of having to type a few responses onscreen. But underneath the simple control scheme lies a game that actually has an interesting story behind it, filled with mystery, and WTFery, with a chaser of religious commentary.

It starts off very simply. The interface is that of an old-school arcade cabinet that you’re playing a game on. Your avatar is a pony, who can jump over gates. Make it to the end of the level, and you win! Hurray for accomplishments. But very soon you start encountering glitches that allow you to change the game by manipulating the code, and strange voices that tell you to do things, and it quickly becomes apparent that Pony Island is far more than a simple 2D side-scroller.

Which, as I mentioned, is no secret by this point. There are dozens of Let’s Play videos on YouTube of people playing this and uncovering some of the game’s secrets, many of which are well worth watching if you don’t have the opportunity to play Pony Island yourself.

WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?

 Of the many voices that will communicate with you throughout the game, the most prominent ones will be Satan (yes, you read that right), and an unnamed “lost soul,” both of whom are trying to manipulate you in some way. Satan, the developer of the game-within-a-game that is Pony Island, wants you to keep playing the game as he intended. The lost soul wants you to undo the game, to destroy the core files that the game requires to function so that the whole thing collapses and the souls trapped within can be freed.

This just got weird!

There are plenty of signs along the way that things are even more complicated than even that description allows for. For instance, some sections of the game require communicating with different entities through an instant messaging program. …Which is also installed on the arcade cabinet. Because reasons. Though combined with other aspects of the game, this is probably better interpreted as representational, since it gets clear pretty quickly that you’re probably dead and your soul is trapped like all the others.

Or it’s just one of the many meta aspects of this game. You, as the player, are playing Pony Island on a computer, so using a computer interface at certain moments just adds another layer to the situation. Pony Island is pretty good for really hammering home that blending and collapsing of fantasy and reality, by having you manipulate pieces of “pseudocode” to reprogram the game, giving you fake error messages, and even leading you to believe that you accidentally messaged a friend on Steam when you meant to type something in-game.

 
There was one point where, after I — and wow, is this ever awkward to say — killed Jesus, that my mouse disconnected and the game slowed to an utter crawl, moving at a few frames per second until I alt-tabbed out and then back into the game again, and even now I’m still not sure if that was a glitch with spectacularly weird timing, or if the game was actually meant to react that way to begin with. Pony Island will troll you, and sometimes you’ll be left wondering if what just happened was intentional or not.

DEFINITE REPLAY VALUE

Pony Island hides a lot of secrets, and unless you’re using a walkthrough, I’m fairly certain you won’t find every one of them on your first playthrough. There are tickets to collect as you play, some of which are easy to find and others that are more challenging, and collecting all of them gives you access to the game’s true ending. There are side areas you can visit that will give you hints about who you are within the game, the life you lived before your soul became trapped within Satan’s haunted arcade cabinet.

The replay value is at odds with the game’s default ending, in which the less malevolent soul that has been guiding you the whole time admits that even though you’ve beaten the game and freed so many of the trapped souls, he (or she, or it; it’s really not clear) remains trapped, and the only way to free them is to delete the game entirely. As you’re grappling with the implications of this (“But I want to play it again and find all the secrets!”), the game closes itself, and you’re left with a minor existential crisis over how to proceed.

Or maybe that was just me.

 
I definitely enjoyed my time with Pony Island. There’s a lot I still have to discover, more tickets I need to collect to unlock the true ending, and even though I’m not that great at some levels (some of the later ones that require jumping, firing, and keeping track of a constantly shifting background really screwed with my head), there was nothing in there that I couldn’t overcome with some practice and determination. More than once I noticed that if I was having repeated trouble with a level, my next attempt would have fewer enemies to shoot or have them come in formations that were easier to handle; if this wasn’t complete coincidence, then it’s an excellent example of adaptive gameplay that can facilitate players beating the game even if they have some difficulty with the required multi-tasking.

There’s a lot here to love. The surprisingly complex backstory, the replayability combined with the relatively short time it takes to beat the game, the different styles of gameplay to explore, a soundtrack that’s 777 flavours of badass, all the secrets to find… There are far worse games you could spend $5 on, let’s put it that way. Pony Island is worth that price and more, and I highly recommend it to those who are looking for a unique and engaging mindfuck.