Pony Island seems like the perfect game for someone like me. From grand longform adventures to five-minute Flash games, I usually eat up this kind of self-aware, metafictional game. However, Pony Island left me strangely underwhelmed. I’m clearly in the minority on this one. Pony Island has received near-universal acclaim, and even for a cynic it’s not hard to see why.
Pony Island centers around an eponymous game-within-a-game where you play as a pony jumping over fences and shooting enemies with a laser fired from your mouth. To break free of the fence-jumping game, you must complete “hacking” puzzles and explore the interface of the ancient computer terminal the game takes place in.
Pony Island has a gorgeous visual aesthetic and great sound design, and the puzzles, while not overly challenging, are genuinely enjoyable. The game also has an anarchic sense of humor that won’t have you laughing out loud, but will probably elicit a few smiles.
One of the biggest problems with the game is that its plot is completely straightforward and spoonfed to you. When beginning the game, you have to complete several hacking puzzles and confront an ominous voice just to reach the first fence-jumping segment. The game starts breaking the fourth wall practically before it even builds one.
Shortly afterward, you learn (very minor spoilers) that the fence-jumping game was created by the Devil (apparently the one from Dinosaur Comics) in order to get you to sell your soul. How do you find this out? The game tells you to insert your soul and the ominous voice straight-up identifies himself as Lucifer.
Everything remotely interesting in the game’s plot is like this. There are no subtle hints that drive you to keep playing. There are no mysteries to unlock, no deeper philosophical musings on the nature of damnation and redemption. You pretty much know the whole deal less than five minutes in, and there aren’t any surprises from that point forward.
I suppose there’s some mystery about the player character’s history but only because the spoonfeeding is artificially constrained. At several points in the game you encounter a demon who offers to answer one of three questions about your life and death. You have to play through multiple times to hear all the answers, but honestly these details are so inconsequential to the game’s plot that it’s hard to care.
One of the game’s main jokes is about how crappy the fence-jumping game-within-a-game is, but you still spend the majority of the game playing slight variations of it. These sections get repetitive very quickly and can be frustrating if you don’t have a good mouse. These segments just feel like padding, and for a game that’s only two hours long, this much padding is hard to justify.
If you have a lot of experience with metafictional games, there’s not much here you haven’t seen done before. Pony Island plays with a lot of interesting ideas (the Asmodeus boss fight might be the game’s high point), and with a little more polish and a little more depth it could have been a truly great game.
If it sounds like I’m being hard on Pony Island, it’s only because of the glowing praise it’s received everywhere else. As it stands, Pony Island good-but-just-good game that justifies its $5 pricetag and the two hours it takes to play but doesn’t leave much of a lasting impact. Still, if the plot grabbed you at all or you enjoy the game’s aesthetic, Pony Island is worth experiencing for yourself.
Softly recommended
