Pony Island is one of those very meta games. You appear to be playing a game on an old arcade machine, but as the game progresses, it quickly becomes clear that the arcade may not be what it seems, and the game itself is not what it seems. Satan seems to want your soul, and you, quite obviously, aren’t going to give it to him.
Played via a virtual CRT monitor, the game quickly breaks down. The core game of Pony Island, where you play a pony jumping over a series of barriers, is broken up with puzzles involving redirecting keys to hack the game, as well as desktop sections where you communicate with another person trapped in the game, as well as constant mockery from Lucifer himself, who tries to convince you to give him your soul to unlock (intentionally terrible) gameplay, and who complains as you keep breaking his games (he worked so hard on them!).
Over the course of the game, you confront three demons in three different battles of wits and solve a number of fairly simple puzzles, all while the game holds up a very thin sheen of not being some sort of demonic thing that might cost you your soul.
Unfortunately, while the game itself is a neat concept, all in all it isn’t terribly fun to *play*. The actual gameplay is intentionally simple and samey, and unfortunately, hanging a lampshade on that fact doesn’t make it any more fun. The puzzles are okay but generally nothing to write home about, and while the sheer variability of the thing is interesting at times, at other times you are spending very long stretches doing the same thing over and over again, which just isn’t very much fun.
The core game of Pony Island is deliberately bad and unfortunately, deliberately bad is still bad.
All in all, I can’t really recommend this. It is a neat idea, but it just doesn’t really end up feeling like it has enough payoff to be worthwhile. It lacks the feeling of profundity you got from games like The Talos Principle; instead, it is just very simplistic and while it presents itself as what it is, ultimately what it is is nothing all that special. After you understand what it is, there’s little left for you here, and while it is only about two and a half hours long (maybe less), it still wore thin by the end. The moments of cleverness simply aren’t worth the time investment.
2.0