This review contains spoilers
I've always been a man who is honest about the games he plays. No matter what and Pony Island is no different.
I don't understand why Pony Island is so beloved. It's a 2016 game, yet it feels like a game from 2010 that's only here to go with the meta concept and nothing more. The puzzles are boring and tedious, the gameplay is also boring and tedious. The story is simplistic and also very boring. For a game about an arcade machine from Lucifer, it somehow manages to be the most boring and frustrating game I've ever played. Perhaps that makes sense, but this game obviously wasn't made by the devil. It was made by Daniel Mullins.
Now, I don't hold ill will towards Daniel. Of course not. Sometimes good devs make bad games. Even Pixar has a few bad movies in their catalog. Solipsis from Dread X Collection 2 was a great short game from Daniel and I hear he's doing a lot of good things with Inscryption, yet this game feels it went home about the idea of it being meta and nothing else to bring the concept forward. It feels like Daniel had a great idea, yet had no idea how to execute it well compared to other games like Spec Ops: The Line or OneShot.
There's a scene in this game that takes your Steam friends list and uses it against you. It's actually a really cool scene, but then it's ruined by what I can assume to be a Skype notification sound. Playing this game in 2022 makes a scene like that hilarious given how Discord wiped Skype off the face of the Earth.
All in all, Pony Island was a miserable experience that I had the misfortune of playing. In the words of Masahiro Ito: "It's terrible so much."
I don't understand why Pony Island is so beloved. It's a 2016 game, yet it feels like a game from 2010 that's only here to go with the meta concept and nothing more. The puzzles are boring and tedious, the gameplay is also boring and tedious. The story is simplistic and also very boring. For a game about an arcade machine from Lucifer, it somehow manages to be the most boring and frustrating game I've ever played. Perhaps that makes sense, but this game obviously wasn't made by the devil. It was made by Daniel Mullins.
Now, I don't hold ill will towards Daniel. Of course not. Sometimes good devs make bad games. Even Pixar has a few bad movies in their catalog. Solipsis from Dread X Collection 2 was a great short game from Daniel and I hear he's doing a lot of good things with Inscryption, yet this game feels it went home about the idea of it being meta and nothing else to bring the concept forward. It feels like Daniel had a great idea, yet had no idea how to execute it well compared to other games like Spec Ops: The Line or OneShot.
There's a scene in this game that takes your Steam friends list and uses it against you. It's actually a really cool scene, but then it's ruined by what I can assume to be a Skype notification sound. Playing this game in 2022 makes a scene like that hilarious given how Discord wiped Skype off the face of the Earth.
All in all, Pony Island was a miserable experience that I had the misfortune of playing. In the words of Masahiro Ito: "It's terrible so much."