Wall Wall Wall Wall.
Subversion makes for tricky discussion. Even saying “it’s not what it seems” kind of gives the game away. And for some video games, the element of surprise is almost all they have. It’s the unsuspecting ground from which other surprises spring forth.
A couple of old examples here to demonstrate my point. Now, spoiler warning for the two games in the title. Me? I’m not phased by such warnings. I first watched The Usual Suspects on a loaned VHS tape where there was a big arrow drawn on the cover pointing to Kevin Spacey with the note “it’s him!”. While it didn’t ruin the film for me, it was far from the pure viewing experience the film makers intended. You can’t unsurprise yourself.
Though it was in this spirit that I played Pony Island followed by Doki Doki Literature Club. I played both knowing they were tricksters. What surprised me was how similar they were.
Discovering The Games
Pony Island
“You’ve got to play Pony Island. You’re playing a cutesy arcade cabinet that has been infected by Satan and you have to hack the game in order to escape eternal damnation. There’s a sound option in the Settings called ‘Ominous Hum’ that you can’t switch off”
Rob Zachny, GWJ Conference Call*
*Quote fabricated from vague recollection and lack of willingness on my part to find the exact episode and timing.
Pony Island sounded inventive. Who doesn’t want to play games with the Satan? What could possibly go wrong there?
Doki Doki Literature Club
This piqued my interest for sure. A quirky horror game with at least one powerful scary moment- exactly the amount my weak stomach can handle.
Buying The Games
This led me to their Steam store pages. Both games are tagged as “psychological horror” alongside their respective main genres of ‘puzzle’/’hacking’ and ‘visual novel’ respectively. User-submitted tags, much like content- and trigger-warnings, serve an important purpose. But how to do it without ruining elements of the story?
Pony Island
Pony Island does not hide itself. The cover image and thumbnails straight up show the demonic play screens. The description even states, “It is not a game about ponies”. Which makes sense. Hiding the demonic would leave a cutesy game about ponies, which surely would be ignored.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Doki Doki Literature Club is somewhat more obscure in its presentation. Yes, it is a romance novel, though the “not suitable for children” warning and “psychological horror” tag are just on the right side of hinting.
Playing The Games
Pony Island
In Pony Island, you play in the fields and you play in the options. In the grass, the simplistic “runner” where you jump the pony over obstacles is, by design, dull. The demonic possessions start ramping up the difficulty and the inventiveness and you quickly find yourself exploring an RPG world on a search for mystic characters. The ramp-up and reveal is cute and fun and stays grounded compared to the absurd Frog Fractions, though the two games share a sensibility.
Playing in the in-game options menus was a particular highlight. Here, among the Music and Sound settings, you find an Ominous Humming slider that can’t be turned down and solutions to many of the in-world puzzles.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Maybe it’s the scientific fact that visual manga games are boring, or perhaps that romance in video games always seems silly to me, or perhaps that what would have been a careful and deliberate reveal felt slow and tedious, but I did not enjoy playing Doki Doki Literature Club. It took a long time to get to where I knew it was going. It disturbed me, sure, because any story with self-harm and suicide is unsettling, but it did not surprise me.
Best Scare
Pony Island
Genuinely one of the top five scariest things to ever happen to me. At one point, a steam chat notification popped up from a friend. The friend was upset at me. I didn’t know why. I panicked as that horrible feeling of prickly heat rushed over the back of my head. And then it turned out to be the demon from the game!
Horrifying.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Eh. There weren’t any big scares. The interesting bit I suppose was having to ALT-TAB out the game to delete a file to kill off the bad character, though this wasn’t scary given how over-explained the whole procedure was.
Conclusion
Pony Island is better. Even though you are playing as a player in Pony Island playing the in-game arcade cabinet, it somehow made more of a connection than Doki Doki Literature Club where the game itself tries to make a more direct connection with you as a player. Turns out more layers of abstraction helped me buy into the conceit.
Both games end with you being freed from the shackles of playing the game, just like this article ends with this sentence freeing you from the burden of reading it.
