This review was requested by Anthony B.
If you want to request your own and subject me to similar torture or mental anguish, Click Here! Enjoy!
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Can you get down with puzzles like the Layton man himself?
Would you consider yourself a religious person?
Do you like ponies?
Well, hold onto your horses and pray to your favorite deity! This is Pony Island!
..It’s not what you think.
Pony island – available on Steam and brought to you by the interesting minds of Daniel Mullins Games – is a puzzle game wrapped in a pixel platformer runner all nicely tucked in with a nice blanket of suspense, horror and ponies.
I take all game requests that I get seriously, so when I went to the Steam store to download this game, I had many questions. The first of them being “What the heck is this?” There were screenshots of what I thought was the worst My Little Pony ripoff ever but actually playing it showed me that Bill Cipher himself couldn’t think of a game so..interesting.
I mean it wasn’t as creepy as watching someone switch out the function of every hole on your face or taking every loved one and turning them into a throne for your enjoyment but ti was still up there.
You are stuck in Limbo, playing a terribly designed arcade game called- you guessed it- Pony Island. Not nearly as good as the PC game you, yourself, are playing but the game smashes the fourth wall enough for us anyway so you can see how confused I was in the beginning. You really have to play the game to really understand what I mean.
You playing a game, inside of a game…blah
It starts off as a simple platformer; just click to jump. Easy right? Too easy. Especially for the devil himself, who made the game you’re stuck in. He hates the fact that you make the game look easy and hates it even more when you cheat. #cheatersneverwin But there is one person who loves it and even helps you exploit the terrible programming, only known by “HOpEleS$0uL.”
Going through the game, only really having the wisdom of “HOpEleS$0uL” guiding you, you progress through the game, finding the exploits, solving the puzzles, fighting the devil, and figuring out your past. And most of that done as..a pony.
Cute, ain’t he?
Now while this game was amazing, there were a few things that I didn’t quite like. This is a short list with the only items being “Moar Game” and “Moar Ponies” copy pasted about 5 times. There were parts of the game where I didn’t know what to do but that was expected since I hadn’t used my l33t hax skills in a long time before playing.
I knew my programming skill would finally come in a handy!
I like the idea of toying with the programmer of a game that I am playing while I am playing it, showing him that I have more control over what I do than he thinks or better yet, than he programmed. The pseudocode programming parts were fun and even challenging when you have someone else trying to “debug” your code mid-click.
As previously mentioned, my only gripe with the game is that I wanted there to be more of it. The only collectables were the tickets that you, the player playing the arcade game, get so 100% completion is a little too easy. I don’t often like to be scared if not for some entertainment value and while this game didn’t have me jumping like I saw Foxy coming from the left door or screaming like Flowey ended my game, the suspense element of “What will the devil do now?” was there and that was enough for me.
Did I mention this game is only 5 bucks on Steam? Download this sucker and play it!
Pony Island – Bring your Holy Water and prepare for a good time!