HYPE
Daniel Mullins returns with a sequel eight years in the making
Developer/publisher Format Origin Release
Daniel Mullins
Games PC
Canada TBA
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
