The Devil hid an arcade cabinet inside the pony box

Fans who have already seen the studio's next big game come back to this one and recognize the first draft — and not all of them think the draft still holds.

A box of ponies, a Devil-built prison

The title promises a pink island with ponies hopping fences. Behind the start screen, something else lives: you are stuck in limbo, locked inside a broken-down arcade cabinet that the Devil put up himself. He cannot stand seeing his puzzles solved and his bad programming laid bare, and he hurls insults at anyone who comes too close to winning. Your first job is to patch the code behind the arcade's rotten curtain; your second is to pretend, for as long as it takes, that you are still playing the pony game he wants to sell you.

Under that innocent surface, this is two games at once. On the visible skin, you push a pony from obstacle to obstacle along a simple, almost retro track. Underneath, you open a text editor and rewrite the very system that runs the con — you take on hell with the tools of someone who repairs programs, not with a sword or a spell. What looks like a harmless puzzle game is really a thriller about working out what this machine is and who built it.

The name on it is Daniel Mullins Games, an independent studio that released the game on January 4, 2016 for Windows, Mac and Linux. In the most recent notes about the sequel, the creator's name stands alone, in the first person — the mark of a small team that speaks for itself to the people who play.

The sequel has a release date — and the studio says the work isn't done

On October 8, 2026, Daniel Mullins Games put out the trailer for Pony Island 2 and opened sign-ups for a test build, still unfinished, that runs in the meantime while the final version is yet to come. According to that same note, the final version arrives on April 27, 2027. Join the test and you will hang on deliberate errors and see broken textures; that is exactly the material the studio wants on record while it tunes the version it intends to ship. Daniel signs the note himself, and he does the waiting math himself too: 11 years since this game came out.

August 25, 2026 brought the public confirmation that the sequel was well under way, along with a new trailer and a request for wishlist adds — and the studio used the occasion to thank everyone still playing the first game, under the in-house nickname the creator uses for the project, Panda Circus. After that, the studio took the project to Gamescom 2026 and opened testing to players from the community, who have been sending back reactions the studio itself describes as far above what it expected.

The players who laughed at the Devil's con

On Steam, where the game has lived since 2016, the con lands fast. One player with just a single hour in, on October 8, 2026, describes the turn as the kind of joke that catches you looking at the wrong side of the screen — the children's cover hiding a real scare. Another, also at one hour on the same date, sums up a similar reaction: funny enough to log the achievement and move on. A Brazilian review from October 9, 2026, with three hours played, describes the shift from colourful kids' art to a corrupted interface as the moment the game shows its true face — and the praise lives in that contrast, not in the scare itself.

With more time on screen, the praise changes key. A six-hour player, on October 2, 2026, calls the game the rough draft of Inscryption, the title the same studio would go on to release — the ideas already there, the execution simpler, and gripping from start to finish even so, without him noticing the hours slip past. Another, at seven hours, on September 16, 2026, cannot sum up in one sentence what he played and recommends it anyway, for the feeling of never being sure what was coming next. For someone twelve hours in, on September 22, 2026, the closest thing to the experience is an induced dream — strange enough to feel wrong and right enough that you don't let go.

The players who knew the trick, and found it thin

A one-hour player, on September 13, 2026, sums up the central stretch — pony and laser — as repetitive to the point of numbness: you push the same obstacle again and again and end up forgetting why you started. Another, also at one hour, on September 19, 2026, agrees: the fourth-wall breaking stays on the surface, and that does nothing to hold back the boredom underneath.

Those who stay longer run into a different irritation. A player with thirteen hours, on October 1, 2026, complains about puzzles too easy to distract from monotonous play, and about screen and sound effects that tire faster than the curiosity does. Another, at eleven hours, on June 1, 2026, grants that the game would be excellent were it not for the decision to repeat silly achievements along the way. Two players name Inscryption as the measure of the drop. One, at two hours, on September 13, 2026, notes that ideas which felt new in 2016 are not enough anymore. The other, at four hours, on September 23, 2026, imagines the same platform with a stronger story behind it. Either way, what is a sketch here showed up whole over there — and a sketch on its own tires you out faster.

Who the Devil's rough draft is for

It is worth your time if you have a genuine curiosity about origins: seeing where a small studio first tried the trick of disguising one genre as another — and accepting that this trial run has its seams showing. It is also worth it for anyone who likes a short session and doesn't mind a joke repeating for a few hours straight, since nobody, in praise or in complaint, describes a long game.

It is not worth it for anyone who has played Inscryption and expects to find the same standard of finish: the comparison turns up on both sides of the reviews, and whoever arrives with that expectation tends to quit in the first hour, right where the people who liked it also felt the con hit hardest — except that, for this group, the con is not enough to carry the rest. Anyone willing to watch a studio learn its own craft comes away satisfied; anyone who already knows the finished lesson comes away impatient.