After Undertale sort of blew up the indie gaming world with a meta game wishing to challenge your preconceived notion of player-game relationships, a slew of imitators came out. Most notably for me was Doki Doki Literature Club, an alright free game on Steam that intentionally combated the player's desire for romance visual novels, and their unhealthy implication. It could feel a bit lecture-y and edgy at times, and it was fast and loose about remaining tactful when talking about self harm and suicide, but the messaging itself was interesting and directed at the core audience most likely to be affected by it. Pony Island does something similar with small-scale arcade-y indie games. Indie games have been swamping Steam for a decade now, and the Humble Indie Bundle and anything else from Humble has most likely filled your library with more run-of-the-mill indie games than you could ever hope to play (and a lot of hidden gems, to be fair). BIT.TRIP RUNNER is a cool game and all, but do I need three sequels and a dozen imitators? Pony Island generally plays exactly like BIT.TRIP RUNNER, where you play as the titular pony and must jump over fences. After a few tries of this, you will more than likely attempt to back out, at which point the game itself - implied to be the game developer - will ask if the game is too easy for you. He will then make it impossibly difficult to beat. In order to bypass this, you will have to go into the options menu and hack the game to allow you to shoot lasers in order to beat the "impossible" level. The developer isn't particularly happy about this.
And so starts your journey into Pony Island, where you will bounce back and forth from playing a runner to rummaging through menus, fake files in a fake operating system, and hacking through a puzzle mini game. The game cabinet for Pony Island, it turns out, was created by Satan, and he is trying to convince you to offer up your soul in order to play better versions of the game. Luckily for you, there is another lost soul (called LostSoul, roughly - at least that's how I'm going to refer to them) who wants you to take down the game and free yourself by finding and deleting the three core files of the game. Hacking the game, on the occasions you do it, amounts to you placing nodes along a series of code looking paths in order to get a digital key to its lock. You get nodes like moving a key left or right, down, portals that will jump the key to another portal in order to create a loop, and a splitter that creates two keys. The hacking mini game got harder than I was expecting out of a 2 1/2 hour game, but never so challenging as to be deep mechanically. That said, I'm a sucker for games that require you to rummage through fake files in game and mess around, so the hacking mini game, fun as it was on its own, felt more than serviceable as a mechanic to act as analogue to what I was supposed to be doing.
The plot feels like a framework for themes and gameplay to play out, more than anything interesting itself. Undermine Satan and free your soul are your only objectives, and everything vaguely serves that purpose, although the real money seems to be in making interesting, subversive scenes. Having Satan mock you for wanting a harder game reads as vaguely commenting on gamer attitudes toward modern gaming, something further reinforced as the game reboots halfway through to dump you into an over tutorialized, polished version of Pony Island to play as you watch it slowly corrupt again (smartly, this sarcastic tone helps cover up the fact that it is actually teaching a new hacking mechanic that becomes necessary later, which is how to use the splitter). There are other minor commentaries on the player-developer relationship as well, such as when you are forced to XP grind in order to continue, and the game gives you laughably small XP points while simultaneously requiring a wealth of them. To continue, you hack the game in order to rack up enough XP to level up and continue with the game. Little Inferno attempted to comment on games wasting your time, but followed up by sort of wasting your time. Pony Island only spends enough time to make its point before moving on, subverting the thing it is being satirical of. There was one particularly inspired subversive moment while fighting the final of the three core file bosses that absolutely had me, but I won't spoil it here.
Pony Island doesn't quite escape its niche, however, and loses some momentum as it goes despite its short length. It's smart, but not as smart as it thinks, coming up with clever ideas without really doing much with them aside from a sly wink. It is, however, able to play around with the player and with information drip the way walking simulators often do, while at the same time being, well, something you actively play. I had fun for most of its length, even if it didn't quite wow me, nor did it really break new ground. Coming out a year after the release of Undertale might make it the second in an indie game genre that might not have a genre name yet (Undertale being a motherlike notwithstanding, since it seems to have created a school of thought only vaguely connected to the odd-ball self awareness the Mother games employ). As such, a lot of Pony Island's critical acclaim on Steam probably has to do with the genre not being nearly as diluted at time of release as it feels now. I'm not sure how well I am at displacing myself from having seen a lot of this before, but regardless, I liked the game and think it's a worthwhile play.
7.0
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