Drive-by review: Filly Astray

(Originally written April 2024)

I haven't been in a good mood lately, so for some reason I kept crawling back to My Little Pony. It's hard not to, since there's so much content! Official and fan media. I watched some episodes earlier this month and read a bunch of comics yesterday, so today I decided to pick up a thinly-disguised fangame that was gifted to me months ago.

A platforming adventure game with a new take on combos, dare you adventure into the world of Filly Astray and face the monsters and mayhem within?!

First, I'm going to approach the elephant in the room. I knew this was based on Friendship is Magic, but I didn't know that the protagonist is basically Anonfilly. TL;DR, according to Equestria Daily, Anonfilly is an OC that originated on 4chan's /mlp/ board. Don't worry, this game does not contain any thinly-veiled political screeds about how zebras and griffons are ruining Equestria. It's just a platform game. There's barely any dialogue or story.

Filly Astray is pretty straight-forward, it just throws you into the first level with little context. Filly defends herself with attacks that can easily chain to increase damage, but watch out - Missing once can mess it up. The sound is painfully average, but the graphics are very good and the animation is smooth. I really enjoy looking at it. The enemies are... Weird. In the sewer level, there's just purple blobs and a weird pony-shaped monster that has appendages similar to a displacer beast. The boss at the end of the sewer is a pony slime monster, and I noticed lizard and fish ponies later.

When reading reviews, I noticed a lot of people mentioned the controls being really janky. I disagreed with this at first, I thought they were fine and breezed through most of the sewer level. Then when the difficulty upped as I went further, I finally started to understand... I had a huge blast with the extra challenge with the slippery slime tiles, but one miscalculated move and I was dead. Over and over. And over. Again, this is a complaint brought up in other reviews, so this isn't solely a CAPY IS BAD AT VIDEO GAMES issue. According to the Steam page, there are 6ish different environments to go through. The controls are just so frustrating, I really didn't want to keep dying over and over to see if I can make out of the sewer.

This is when I stopped. Having 3 stage hazards at once is a bit too much.

Take this review with a grain of salt, since I didn't finish enough of the game. I just had enough thoughts on it that was long enough to be a filler page. Filly Astray is an okay game that could've been better if it was polished a bit more. I'm really disappointed, since I did enjoy the very beginning. It wasn't the worst way to spend my afternoon and evening, but it feels like I left empty-handed minus this shitty review. If you're still interested, you can buy it on Steam, or try out the demo in-browser on itch.io. (I recommend trying the latter first, since $10 is a bit too steep for a game like this.) The developer Bit Assembly has other MLP-themed fan games too. Unless you're on a quest to play every pony-related game that exists, there's a wealth of other indie platform games to play out there.

6/10

Cry moar.