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.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.