PONY ISLAND 2: PANDA CIRCUS
Daniel Mullins returns with a sequel eight years in the making
You wake once more in the purgatorial arcade where you’re being held captive by an unseen devil. Rising from the floor, vision still blurry, you stumble towards the nearest source of light, which resolves itself into the shape of a cabinet, its screen blinking into life. Gradually the contents come into focus: a crude cartoon panda, a few sticks of bamboo and a rising sun, and the words ‘Pony Island 2: Panda Circus’.
Remarkably, this scene isn’t lifted from last December’s reveal trailer, which debuted during The Game Awards’ pre-show, but from the original 2016 game – an Easter-egg reward for players dedicated enough to crack the clues of its accompanying ARG. “It was this teaser, for a future game that I did intend to make,” confirms Daniel Mullins. Just not right away.
The original game was Mullins’ debut, after a failed Kickstarter (for Catch Monsters, a never-completed Pokémon riff) and a handful of game-jam entries, one of which became the prototype for Pony Island. It did better than the developer could ever have hoped, in part thanks to a PewDiePie Let’s Play video. “I wanted to capitalise on the success I’d had,” Mullins says, “but also not to get boxed into doing the same thing again.”
Instead, he started work on 2018’s The Hex, which had half a dozen genre studies, from platformer to turn-based tactics, concealed within its adventure-game shell. He considered picking the sequel back up after that, before the “perfect happenstance” of ‘Sacrifices Must Be Made’, a Ludum Dare entry that grew into Inscryption – another unexpected success, breaking a million sales in the first three months. Yet through it all, he says, “I had always kept this document of ideas for Panda Circus. And, as I got thinking about it more during Inscryption’s development, that document started to get bigger and bigger.”
The trailer provides a smash-cut peek at the contents of that document, flashing between a collage of styles: pixel art, Myst-like 3D landscapes, even FMV clips. In addition to the original Pony Island’s endless-runner and logic-puzzle sections we spy what appear to be a point-and-click adventure, a top-down brawler, and a round of minigolf. “It’s quite diverse,” Mullins says. “The thing to look at would probably be The Hex, in terms of the variety of gameplay that’s in there.” Mullins explains the shape he’s chosen to hold together all the disparate parts of Panda Circus: “In some ways, it’s like a weird Metroidvania.”
Mullins counts himself as a fan of the genre – he’s recently finished Blasphemous 2, which he describes as an “exceptionally good” example of the form – but has been pondering the purpose of all that running back and
forth, accumulating items and abilities. “The answer in that game – and I guess the answer for me – is that ultimately you find something amazing. You get to finally open up a room and there’s some giant weird guy in there who says some lore to you. And that’s your final reward.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mullins’ take on the Metroidvania is not entirely typical. Your growing inventory takes the form of a mystical USB stick, loaded with executables that interface with the game-within-a-game you’re currently playing. Meanwhile, instead of the traditional Metroid “ant farm” approach, as Mullins calls it, here the areas you’re unlocking are connected by 3D space: this underworld overworld in which you find yourself boasts a variety of arcade cabinets, all waiting for the insertion of your USB device.
It’s a logical next step after Inscryption, a card game in which you periodically stand up from the table in order to nose around the rest of the cabin. But where that game locks you into fixed perspectives, here you’re totally free to explore. “In Inscryption, I can very tightly control what you see,” Mullins says. “But now you can go and look at any little corner up close, and I’d like to have a high level of visual quality there.” Environments are much higher fidelity, too, without the obscuring darkness and pixelation filter. This is all made possible by Inscryption’s success, Mullins acknowledges. It has given him the resources to expand his team, and so he has contracted additional 3D artists alongside previous collaborators David Hagemann and Sean Karemaker. Still, he adds sheepishly, “My costs are still quite low compared to other game studios!”
If there’s a slightly speculative quality to our conversation, it’s only partly because Mullins is keen to preserve the element of surprise. There’s a reason that trailer ended with its release date apparently on the fritz, jumping between 2024 and 2026: each of his games has taken longer to make than the last. Having started in earnest last year, when Inscryption’s final console ports were finished, Mullins reckons he’s currently in the “long middle” of development, and is still discovering exactly what Panda Circus will be. “Part one of, maybe, four is in decent shape. Part two is halfway done; the rest is a figment of my imagination.”
While things are a little clearer this time around – “I have an ending in mind, and I haven’t had that before” – Mullins describes himself as “an anti-planner”. Which perhaps comes as something of a surprise from the man who first teased this game eight years ago, even if it does help explain the streamof-conscious quality – the sense, in a medium built on reliable loops, that anything could happen in the next half-hour – that makes his games so appealing. “The way I am
a planner is that, if I do have an idea, I make sure to write it down and keep it,” he counters. In the case of Panda Circus, mostly these are “meta ideas – or pranks, almost – that didn’t quite make sense to put in my other games.”
Which raises the question of what he did
have in 2016. The title, of course – though that was somewhat arbitrary, produced through the “animal-plus-placename” method that gave him Pony Island. “But it had a certain ring. And then I guess the panda summoned an idea of, well, if this game was focusing on European Christian mythology, maybe this would bring in Chinese mythology and history.” That led him to the game’s villain: ‘King Yan’, the Chinese god of death, now played by SungWon Cho. “Although this expanded Panda Circus that I’m now working on includes more than just that character. He’s just your nemesis for part one.”
This, then, is not the game that Mullins would, or could, have made if he’d begun right after Pony Island’s release. He’s a more experienced developer, with a much higher profile thanks to Inscryption, enough so that Cho immediately said yes to the part and the Game Awards spot could be secured without the assistance of a publisher. It’s tantalising to imagine what Mullins and his expanded team might be able to achieve with a bigger canvas – and a palette of boobytraps he’s been waiting the best part of a decade to deploy.
Your growing inventory takes the form of a mystical USB stick, loaded with executables