Pony Island

This is an extremely weird, charming, funny game. It's funny because it plays around with your expectations of what a game can do, and it subverts your expectations and familiarity with what games are supposed to do. It's like a mini-game collection on a clothesline: Together, they all tell a bigger story while zooming around the narrative rather than dishing out short distractions for amusement's sake alone. The least fun mini-games involve a flowing current through a series of basic computer commands represented by arrow icons. The goal with those games are to shuffle the arrows into an order that guides a key icon to a lock icon. This gets harder when you have to pay closer attention to the logic, such as when a certain variable must be above or below a certain number, which in turn can only be manipulated by creating carefully managed loops throughout the greater circuit. If that sounds a little confusing, that's because it is.

Though it's intended to create a more cerebral type of action in the game, it also slows down the stranger and more interesting interactions that take place here. Pony Island shines when you find yourself instant-messaging with the devil and your in-game friend simultaneously, playing ridiculous action levels (you can unlock wings and lasers for the pony), and simply uncovering the many quirks in this self-aware machine. It's weird. It's charming. It's funny. It's Pony Island.