Recommended: "Horse Games Are Trash and I’m Over It"
About a month ago, a passionate rant posted to the /r/Games forum on Reddit brought the topic of horse games and their faults to a wide audience.
Since author Emily Tapley linked to The Mane Quest as inspiration and further reading for their post, the Reddit attention led to a spike in this website’s traffic high enough to make January 2020 its most active month yet.
The post was upvoted over fifteen thousand times and received over sixteen hundred comments, many of them sympathetic to the poster’s plight, and many suggesting games they might not have tried yet.
The Plaid Horse, an online magazine dedicated to horses and equestrianism, approached the post’s author shortly afterwards to share a slightly edited version of the Reddit rant on their blog.
A very whole-hearted reading recommendation:
Horse Games Are Trash and I’m Over It
Despite TMQ’s growing community, I still often feel somewhat alone in the “fight” for horse game fans to be recognized as a serious audience. Emily’s post and its wide spread are balm to my soul.
Note: the game Emily refers to as Gallop and Ride in her article has also been sold as My Riding Stables: Life With Horses. My review of it can be found here.
I have written about The Ranch of Rivershine on this site on various occasions over the years, but what’s been missing is an actual review of the game. The time for that has definitely come, so let’s dive into my actual play experience with the most successful indie horse game on Steam.
Horse Club Adventures 2 – Hazelwood Stories was developed and published by Wild River Games from Germany and released on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One in October 2022. With a few years’ delay, let’s finally look into how Horse Club Adventures 2 compares and what it offers.
Part of my joy in writing these reviews comes from telling you in excruciating detail about the games you don’t already know and care about. This game has 11 reviews on Steam in total, so I can actually add relevant insight here – and I personally was very interested in this game considering the history of its franchise.
My Horse: Bonded Spirits first caught my eye (and ire) when its CG-rendered announcement trailer released in Spring 2023. Today we’re looking at the actual game: What fresh ideas it brings to the table, what it offers in terms of content, how that compares to similar available products and of course: how the actual release compares to that initial trailer.
When the long hoped-for Sims 4: Horse Ranch expansion pack released in July 2023, I briefly thought I would be on time and relevant with a review for once. And then I got distracted and put on sick leave. My in-depth look at the Horse Ranch pack may no longer be timely, but it will be overly elaborate and familiarly pedantic about equine accuracy, because that’s what you all come to The Mane Quest for, isn’t it.
Ghost of Tushima is an open world action adventure game released in 2020 on PlayStation 4, developed by Sucker Punch Productions and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
I don’t usually review AAA games on here, but I decided to make an exception. The fact that I started playing it in August 2022 and am uploading this review about 9 months later might give you a hint as to how that’s been working out for me. Let’s take a closer look at the horses of Ghost of Tsushima.
Star Equestrian is a brand new mobile horse game by Foxie Ventures. It will offer cross country and show jumping, an open world to explore, story missions and daily quests to complete, and quite a variety of horses and tack to collect and level up.
To get my feedback and give me an opportunity to ask a few questions, Foxie Ventures’ Product Manager Steven Ready invited me to a live playthrough and video call. Join me today for a preview of what the game has in store.
Vintage Story is a block-based survival game that one might summarize as “Minecraft with extra steps”. I’m obsessed with it and have played for 300 hours. There are horse mods already, and official horses are coming in the near future.