A little pony gets lost in an enchanted forest and you have to find it. That logic could work, except Pony Quest explains it rather reluctantly. It's basically a puzzle-adventure where you move across a black-and-white map, collect items and solve simple brain-teasers. NES from 2015 — sure, it's a homebrew, the kind of game anyone could whip up in a garage using retro console tools.

The playing field is oddly static. You move square by square, not smoothly. Collecting items, combining them and fiddling around seems to work, but without a manual (which you rarely had anyway) you often fumble around pointlessly. The controls are primitive — that's normal for NES, but this game doesn't make any fun out of it. The sounds are quiet background noise you'll forget about within the first few minutes. The graphics really set the bar low, even by 90s standards.

Pony Quest is an attempt at something ambitious for a bedroom coder — detective logic on an 8-bit console. But in practice it drags slowly, without ideas and without anything to make you enjoy it. It's not a bad game, just unnecessarily dull. What's worse is that the puzzles aren't clever at all, they just look like the author was solving them for the first time himself.

You'll play it today if you're specifically interested in this kind of curiosity — what an amateur managed to create for NES without help. You'll remember the game at best as a manual-reading exercise. Playable, but without anything that would give you reason to play it again.