Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, the sequel from Daniel Mullins Games, now has a playtest you can request access to on Steam. The announcement arrived with a new trailer during the Triple-i Initiative, and it spends most of its runtime showing how many different games are packed inside one. This is, as the developer keeps insisting, not a game about ponies.
Quick answer: Open the Pony Island 2: Panda Circus Steam page and click Request Access on the playtest banner. You get notified when the developer admits more participants.
What Pony Island 2: Panda Circus is
You play a young nomad once expected to conquer the world, but an early death sends you to The Earth Prison, an underworld governed by deities. To get out with your soul and sanity intact, you bargain with them and win—or break—their games. You have a steed, a thumb drive, and your wits to rely on.
Mullins has described the systems here as closer to The Hex and Inscryption than to the 2016 original. The Earth Prison works as a central hub of interconnected chapters that you move between using a digital key. Composer Jonah Senzel, who scored Mullins’ earlier work, returns for the soundtrack.
On Steam it is tagged as a puzzle, point-and-click, and psychological horror game, with single-player, Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud, and Family Sharing support. It is listed in English with full audio, plus interface and subtitle support across more than a dozen languages, Mongolian and Traditional Chinese among them.
The genres stacked inside the trailer
The footage starts at a steppe yurt camp, where a woman gives your character a carved relic marked with glowing cyan symbols. The visuals then shift through several styles. In one 3D first-person segment, you pull back a recurve bow on open plains, cross paths with mounted travelers, and are struck down.
Between these segments, a horned, demonic skull terminal interrupts with messages like “IT IS BRAVE TO REMEMBER” and “THERE IS MUCH TO SEE, MORTAL …”. The same arcade-cabinet framing returns throughout, complete with corrupted BIOS text from a fictional “Syltech Inc.” and prompts asking for a key to proceed.
The retro sections range widely: a 2D shooter starring a centaur archer; top-down strategy in which you direct units against sheep herds and onagers; nighttime pixel-map exploration of a fenced village; a puzzle about collecting blocks; and a desk interrogation led by bear-headed guards.
There is also a survival-flavored top-down map modeled on historical medieval travel, carrying hunger and thirst meters, alongside endless-runner sequences and interactive glitch menus. A courtroom screen asks “HOW DO YOU PLEAD?” and offers GUILTY or NOT GUILTY, right after an arrest scene flashes “FREEZE!”
Even the options menus are in on the joke. One settings screen rates an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 as “kinda mid,” while a puzzle simply instructs you to “Make all the clowns stand up.”
The deities and bosses you face
The narrative runs on torment from the deities of The Earth Prison. The Chinese god of death, King Yan, appears as a tormentor, and actor SungWon Cho performs the role through full-motion video segments. Live-action faces, including a streamer named Mara and a character labeled “AHRIMAN,” break into the game’s UI through webcam-style boxes and call screens.
The boss roster shown spans both the 2D and 3D layers. These are the named encounters the trailer puts on screen.
| Boss | Notes |
|---|---|
| Sea Tsar | 2D archer battle |
| Giant Wolf | 2D archer battle |
| Huanglong | Pixel dragon fight |
| The White Tiger | Uses a Pac-Man-style maze mechanic |
| The Azure Dragon | 2D mythic encounter |
| Yanluo Wang, Judge of Death | 3D boss fight tied to King Yan |
How to join the Steam playtest
Signing up takes a single click. On the game’s Steam page, the playtest banner carries a Request Access button. Press it, and Steam notes your interest so the developer can notify you when more participants are let in.
You know it worked when the button changes to confirm your request and Steam tells you it will notify you once the developer is ready for more testers. Access is not guaranteed for everyone who signs up, so marking interest only puts you in the pool.
Earlier testing waves ran through the developer’s Discord, including a Phase 2 round aimed at players willing to deliberately stress-test edge cases and break complex interactions. That community effort was tied to the game’s appearance at Gamescom 2026.
The original Pony Island is free through October 12th
The playtest comes with a chance to claim the original Pony Island for free on Steam. Claim it for your account by October 12th to keep it permanently. The first game is more straightforward than its follow-up, but leads directly into the sequel’s ideas, making this giveaway a simple way to try a game now over a decade old.
As for the sequel itself, Pony Island 2: Panda Circus is planned for release on April 27th, 2027 on PC. It runs on modest hardware, with the recommended spec sitting around a GTX 1050 or RX 460, 8GB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. Until launch, the playtest is the way to get hands-on early, whether or not you end up getting pulled in.
