Too Long; Didn't Play: Pony Island

Studded by: CatPhoenix

Time spent horsin' around: 57 minutes

Author’s Note:

I was given very clear instructions to avoid looking up anything about this game before trying it. I will pass that advice along to you: Under no circumstances should you read this review unless you have played Pony Island. The entire review is intended for people who have played Pony Island, which according to my Friends List is 15 people, also known as thrice my regular readership.

If you have not played Pony Island and still wish to read this review, you will not understand the joke unless you seek out spoilers, so you must decide for yourself if you want to play the game at all, because the experience will not be the same once spoiled.

It’s worth playing, so make sure you deliberate on this decision.

Pony Geas Review

It's no sparkle ponies, but it will gallop off with your heart. And with your soul, if you're careless about it.

Equestrian Quest Review

Pony Island is neat little runner-type game featuring uber-retro graphics. I mean, we’re not talking eight bit. We’re talking four-bit, maybe even two-bit graphics. Apple IIE graphics with two tones and pixels the size of dinner plates.

It’s not an unpleasant aesthetic, but it will drive off the more hoary graphics-aficionados. (Unless they’re hoary-graphics aficionados, in which case it may tend to attract them.)

The gameplay involves a horse running to the right. You have control over when it jumps, with the left mouse button, and where it aims and shoots its love-beam, with the right. It’s simple, but sometimes a simple game is satisfying. I mean, just think of the success Crossy Road has had.

Anyway, it’s a shame that the game is hidden behind instability and some of the worst interface design I’ve ever seen in my life.

The game frequently crashes to its own menu screen, for example. That hasn’t happened to me since my father and I played Area 51 so well that the game crashed to its own attract mode. That was in an arcade back in the mid 1990s. I would have thought that kind of bug was a thing of the past. Nope.

Even when it’s not resetting itself, the menu is flat-out broken. It took me five minutes to figure out how to get from the title screen to the actual game. Half of the menu options don’t work at all. Clicking them just causes the game to make a horrible sound and flash the screen white. In at least one instance a menu literally fell apart while I was using it. The text from the menu items dropped down to the bottom of the screen as if it were hanging from a string that I cut. I had to figure out how to use a menu that was a jumble of letters at the bottom of the screen.

Again, that’s a new one on me. I’m not even sure how a bug like that happens without deliberate sabotage.

Oh, and the developers appear to have left a debug mode in the game where they can chat with each other via simple text. I tried to use it to tell them they’re game was broken, but the chat system must be read-only in the retail version, because neither of them listened to a single word I typed. So to users 1U@iF#r or h0peles$0uL at Daniel Mullins Games: If you’re reading this, your game is broken and the chat feature doesn’t seem to work.

Some of the interface doesn’t even look like an interface. It’s just a mish-mash of random, jumbled characters and figures that you have to click through in the hopes that something gets you to a screen that does something again. Occasionally I found myself in some sort of debug mode where, no kidding, I had to use runtime traps to run specific lines of code in order to exit infinite loops that the game got itself stuck in. I have some coding experience (though I’m by no means an expert), so I was able to figure it out, but that’s not an excuse for that kind of sloppy work.

It’s a shame, too, because the core game is actually fun – especially after inadvertently discovering the bug that lets you set your love-beam power as high as you want. Nothing like killing a boss in one hit to make your day, even if the game seems to realize that part of itself is broken because it called me a cheater for doing it.

Hey developers: If you don’t want players to cheat, maybe don’t leave your config files hanging out and editable from the game interface.

Will I Keep Playing?

I may. The core gameplay is just barely fun enough to balance the annoying menu interface. There seems to be some kind of story, but I haven’t gotten deep enough in to find out what’s going on in it.

Is it the Devil Daggers of broken games?

I never know if bad interface design should count toward this score. It feels unfair to ding a game for being difficult when it wasn’t difficult by design. Then again, it doesn’t really matter if the game is supposed to be hard – though intentionally difficult player experience is probably more likely to tune the difficulty well.

Call it 7 out of 10 daggers. If they patch it, I’ll reduce that score.

Comments

Sooooo, I didn't read the review.
But I'm pretty sure you have more than five readers.

This article feels like Poe's Law writ large.

I have literally no idea how firmly pressed into your cheek your tongue is, DT.

Like a knight in shining armor, from a long time ago.

Eleima wrote:

Sooooo, I didn't read the review.
But I'm pretty sure you have more than five readers. :)

Yes, but "thrice" is easier to say than "two and a half times."

Jonman wrote:

This article feels like Poe's Law writ large.

I have literally no idea how firmly pressed into your cheek your tongue is, DT.

IMAGE(http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/012/132/thatsthejoke.jpg)

Concave wrote:

Like a knight in shining armor, from a long time ago.

Well that's stuck in my head now.