Pony Island 2: Panda Circus 'is not a game about ponies'
In a trailer shown during The Game Awards, Daniel Mullins Games revealed a sequel to well-liked 2016 indie game Pony Island. It's called Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, and is apparently «a phantasmagorical voyage through time, myth, divinity, and video games» that is «not a game about ponies.»
Where the original Pony Island combined a parody of autorunners with a puzzle game about hacking Satan's computer to escape an afterlife where you were forced to play Pony Island forever, Pony Island 2 seems to be leaning more into the «every game idea all at once» aesthetic of the developers' other games, The Hex and Inscryption.
The trailer suggests a combination of pixel-art JRPG, 2D mounted archery, croquet minigolf, twin-stick action, and clown-based conveyor puzzling, as well as more demon-related computer hacking. There are also live-action segments in which SungWon Cho plays some kind of antagonistic overlord named «King Yan», and then someone plugs a USB stick into a bow.
Basically, it's a lot. Familiarity with previous Daniel Mullins Games suggests you'll need a lot of patience for self-referential stuff and videogames about videogames. If that's your cup of tea, Pony Island 2's release date glitches between 2025 and 2026 at the end of the trailer, so you might need to wait a bit. It's already got a Steam page, though.
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