Pony Island

About Pony Island

Pony Island was made by Daniel Mullins, later the maker of Inscryption, and released in January 2016 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It holds a Metacritic score of 86 on PC, and its makers call it a suspense puzzle game in disguise.

You are in limbo, trapped in a malevolent and malfunctioning arcade machine devised by the devil himself. It starts as a crude pony game on an old CRT screen, with a title menu from 1992, but the machine keeps breaking: menus glitch, screens fill with ones and zeros, and the game asks you to insert your soul to continue.

To go on you peer behind the rotting curtain of the game and repair its broken code, dragging commands into place to make lasers fire or doors open, and play along with the devil's demented pony game, where a winged horse fights demons. The devil detests having his puzzles solved and his poor programming exposed, and he insults you when you do, while other trapped souls send messages through the machine's desktop.

It is unsettling more than frightening, a horror built from a game that hates you. It suits players who liked Inscryption or IMSCARED.

How to play Pony Island

1. Buy it on Steam for Windows, Mac or Linux.
2. Play the pony game as it is, until it starts to break.
3. Fix the broken code by placing commands in the right order.
4. Read the messages on the machine's desktop and follow them toward a way out.

Tips

• Think outside the box; the game expects you to.
• Pay attention to anything that looks like a glitch.

Questions