Pony Island / YMMV

Alas, Poor Scrappy: You have to kill Louey to escape Pony Island, an act some find heartbreaking. Although a mascot created by Lucifer to steal your soul, he was just there to teach you how to play the game, with no intentions to directly harm you and have fun in spite of the game's reality falling apart. He just wanted you to learn how to play Pony Island. Even his creator calls you out on it.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Hopeless Soul is on your side. But is he really who he says he is? He doesn't resemble a typical human disembodied spirit in the machine for starters. And then, there's all the Daemons calling him out to be a "false prophet". People have been messing around in Pony Island's code enough to realize Lucifer speaks in different voices, and is role-playing the sides of good and evil, just to have fun with you. Curiously he begs you "not to tell father".
- Of course, this also raises the question of Lucifer's true character. If the Hopeless Soul is indeed simply a guise Lucifer takes, what does that mean for his morality? Is he really that terrible a programmer and game designer? Why all the tickets? Maybe he just likes having fun with you? Lucifer is a complicated individual, apparently.
Best Boss Ever: Asmodeus, see Magnificent Bastard below for specifics. It's hard not to like the guy for all the clever mind-games he pulls.
Cry for the Devil: It's not hard to feel bad for Lucifer when you realize he's a more grandiose take on the "disheartened developer" story you usually see. He's legitimately more interested in making a good game than he is collecting souls for it, to the point where his bad mood only really surfaces if he catches you fixing his lackluster programming, but slowly got more desperate to keep up with the demand. To quote the "Devil Island" credits:
I MADE IT. ME. THE DEVIL. I MAKE GAMES. PEOPLE TALK SHIT 'CAUSE I DON'T HAVE A HIGH CONVERSION RATE OF PLAYERS TO SOUL SACRIFICES. BUT IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT THAT. THE SOULS ARE JUST A WAY OF COUNTING HOW MANY PEOPLE LIKE THE GAME. IF THEY JUST TOLD ME THEY LIKED IT... I MIGHT NOT EVEN NEED SOULS.
Fridge Horror: If you tamper with the save data, you can end up with Satan telling you he likes to talk in other voices.. What if Hopeless Soul is really Satan, and you’re playing to his strings, and uninstalling it will free Satan?
Friendly Fandoms: With Undertale, due both games having come out around a similar time as well as having plots that deal with a great deal of Fourth Wall-breaking regarding video game mechanics.
Goddamned Bats: The little devils (and butterflies) that fly and circle around you before going in for the kill. You better attack them quick. Even worse are the glitched butterflies which you must not attack. Accidentally firing upon them crashes the game and it's straight back to the beginning of the stage for you. Trying not to kill Jesus is incredibly frustrating because there's two of these easy-to-hit things, constantly circling him, all while normal butterflies are homing in on you... that you need to attack.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The devil is trying to woo and charm the protagonist, Theodore, a battle-hardened, possibly blood-thirsty crusader, who has forsaken his own family to wage war... with ponies and video games aimed at very young audience demographics. Let that fact sink in for a minute.
Magnificent Bastard: Asmodeus.exe describes himself as more sophisticated than the other daemon programs, and lives up to his boast very well. Asmodeus challenges the player to a simple game: Don't leave the game window, and answer his questions correctly. Once it starts, Asmodeus steadily begins to employ a series of clever, fourth-wall breaking tricks to either ruin the player's focus or dupe them into tabbing out, ranging from taking the guise of somebody on their Steam friends list, to faking a game crash. Once beaten, Asmodeus congratulates the player for their performance, and accepts his death with pride.
Paranoia Fuel: Because you're trapped in Satan's game, you are helpless, and have no way of knowing on your first play-through whether he's watching you tampering with the machine, and about to intervene, or if he's distracted.
Special Effects Failure: When playing in a different ratio than 16:9, the messages sent by Asmodeus pop up in the wrong position of the screen, instantly killing the illusion.
That One Achievement: For gamers, it's either finding all 24 tickets and earning the title "Ticket Master". Or learning all the truths of your past from the demon Baphomet.
- For the former, special mention goes to the ticket earned by not killing Jesus during Act 3, since so much as grazing the glitch butterflies flying around him sends you back to the start of the level... and with all of the butterflies swarming you in the second half of the level, this is incredibly easy to do. Some butterfly formations are straight-up impossible to survive because of this, basically turning the whole affair into an irritating Luck-Based Mission that, if the RNG particularly hates you, can take upwards of an hour to finally accomplish - longer than the entire rest of the game for some.
Ugly Cute: Louey.
Unintentional Period Piece: At one point the game fakes a crash. However the window that appears is a Windows 7 style window meaning the illusion would not be as effective on any other operating system making it appear dated as Windows 7 is no longer supported.

YMMV / Pony Island

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