What makes horses in games feel alive and how do you get players to care for them? When complex independent behaviors are out of scope, what measures can developers take to give players a sense of emotional attachment on a budget? How do you get game horses to feel like actual living creatures rather than just four-legged bicycles? Fortunately, there are a lot of options if you’re a little bit horse-savvy, so let’s look at some of them
Following the announcement of Equinox: Homecoming, Harvey Randall at PC Gamer began to wonder why someone would make a game like that and what is up with the horse game niche in general. Naturally, I was happy to provide some insight.
How do horses live? What does a stable look like? Splendid barn aesthetics are nice to have for humans, but what horses really need are the so-called three Fs: Friends, Forage and Freedom. Today I want to have a look at what meeting those needs looks like and how horse-focused media can play an important role in education and normalization when it comes to the question of “What should a cool, fancy, high quality stable look like?”
I was invited to a brand new podcast called You Are Error, hosted by games journalist Nathan Grayson for Aftermath. Nathan and I talked about some of the many ways in which mainstream video games keep dropping the ball when it comes to including horses and why I’m sure that the horse game audience is bigger than anyone realizes and has a lot of potential.
I was a speaker at Devcom 2024 in Cologne, giving a presentation on my horse game work. The recorded talk is now available on YouTube!
Moon Channel, a YouTube creator of gaming video essays, has released a fantastic video tackling the history and market of so-called “girl games” – video games deliberately marketed to and targeted at young female players.
Noa Leibson is an art historian, life-long rider and writer of equestrian fiction and non-fiction. I finally managed to take her up on her offer to give us all some fascinating insight into ancient historical chariot racing, the men and women (!) who participated in it, and how video games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins succeed and fail in their representations of this fascinating sport.
We sometimes about “horse games” as if that term described a specific genre. In reality, while many classic horse games do fit into the farm buildup and simulation genre, the concept of “game that features horses prominently and has lots of mechanics relating to them” is not tied to that setup at all. In this article and the two previous volumes in this series, I try to broaden people’s horizons a little as to what could be cool horse games.
As a surprise to literally no one, I have a lot of thoughts on what the creators of games with horses in them could be doing better. Every horse game player has dreams and ideas and could start listing all the features that their ideal horse game would have in an instant. Let’s ignore the dream projects today and focus on a handful of fairly basic, relatively easily fixable* mistakes that horse game developers should really stop making.
A few weeks ago, popular gaming website Polygon asked me to write a contribution to their “Horse Girl Canon”: A series of articles for and by horse lovers, about all sorts of horsey content across multiple media.
There has been a significant amount of progress in recent years in how female characters are included and designed.
What remains is an imbalance between how our industry tackles subject matters and activities that have a gendered connotation, which is a significant factor in the utter scarcity of well-made games about horses.
When I published my article about Horse Isle 3’s development in December, I was certain I was done writing about this game for a while. After all, I had made my peace with the fact that the game is not for me and had put my most urgent criticisms into words.
And then, the Gulag incident happened. Yes, bear with me here.
Welcome back to another round of Horse Games That Should Exist! This is where we like to fantasize about what horse-focused games we would want to have in our lives, if only the world were fair. This time featuring unicorns, cowboys and puns!
Most horse-focused games feature brushing your horse and picking its hooves, feeding or combing mane and tail. Unfortunately, many of these horse care minigames quickly grow tedious or even frustrating: let’s take a look at why that is, what developers could do differently, and whether or not horse care mechanics are even necessary to begin with.
Outside of the genre of “horse games”, there are plenty of games in which one or multiple horses are a secondary feature. The horses in games like The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption have varying depths of gameplay and serve purposes such as being a means of transport, an important Non-Playable Character or one of many collectible items. Broadly speaking, most implementations of horses in video games fit into one of two categories: Companion Horses and Collectible Horses.
I am convinced that putting the focus on horses as a theme and setting and making a solid, well-executed game are not mutually exclusive. Or at least, they shouldn’t be. And while I would do many things for a good stable management game, that is far from the only genre in which a good horse game could be made.
Here at The Mane Quest, I got pretty damn excited when press information in September started to promise that Red Dead Redemption 2 would include “Dressage” moves if you bonded enough with your horse.
Now that the game is out and I’m at least a few hours and several levels of horse bonding into it, let’s have a look at which dressage moves you can perform in Red Dead Redemption II, how you execute said moves, and how they look in real life.
To say that Jason Kingsley leads an interesting life is quite the understatement: Kingsley is the CEO and co-founder of a successful game development company and owns 15 horses and trains them in medieval style riding.
Needless to say, Jason Kingsley made for an incredibly fitting interview partner for The Mane Quest.
Horse Games are an underserved niche and their players are practically begging for new projects to follow and support. With this article, I want to give people in the horse game audience some tools and background information on how to better gauge which projects might deliver on their promises, which red flags to watch out for in new game announcements and which critical questions to ask.