Horses 2025 is Out Now and Unsurprisingly Looks Nothing Like Its Announcement Trailer

In case you missed it, about a year ago an odd game announcement made waves in the horse game community. See my article to catch up on all the ways in which the Horses 2025 trailer raised suspicions on my end. 

While initially announced for a release in 2026, then being delisted from the PS5 store entirely, Horses 2025 by developer Md Adnan Hossain has in fact released in its titular year on December 12th and can now be bought for USD 14.99 on the PS5 store. 

I have not in fact bought it, nor do I plan to write an actual review, but I did want to put out a quick follow up to give everyone who cares a little bit of closure: Much like I suspected from its cobbled-together trailer and AI-generated screenshots upon announcement, Horses 2025 looks nothing like its initial marketing materials and has all the signs of your average low-effort asset flip. We can tell thanks to an hour-long gameplay video uploaded by Youtube Channel Remco Heesbeen. 

The gameplay video shows a virtual world put together from photorealistic assets in combination with UI consisting of ugly grey boxes and ill-fitting icons, with the original AI-generated “screenshots” now serving as loading screens. The horse itself uses the ever-shoddy Horse Animset Pro model and animations, and I highly suspect the voice over narration is AI-generated. Gameplay consists of walking around to interact with items at green markers, a first person horse-hosing minigame, endless-runner style obstacle evading on a race track and following markers through one of two trail ride maps. All options for interactions seem to be exhausted after the roughly sixty minutes of playtime seen in the video. 

This isn’t some weirdly unflattering screencap I took. This is one of the official promotional screenshots shown in the PS5 store. Jesus fucking christ how bad can you make your product look.

Look I would not be opposed to an innovative combo of endless runner evasion gameplay with more traditional horse care elements, but this absolutely ain’t it.

Voice lines overlap or are randomly nonsensical, texts contain typos and grammar errors, many interactions lack feedback or fitting animations, and progressing in some missions is obviously unintuitive enough that the recording player struggles to complete seemingly simple tasks such as “go riding”. 

In short: the game looks horrible. The rating average of 1.64 stars in the PS5 store supports that impression. If you’re that desperate for riding the HAP-horse around a mostly empty world to an AI-generated voice over, you’re better off with My Horse: Bonded Spirits, and I don’t really recommend that one either. 

Many thanks to Pascal and Gord on Bluesky for sending me the PS5 store screenshots!

I guess they at least tried to add feathering? But then again you’re not getting points for such obvious disregard of how leg markings work on horses. This just looks like knitted sleeves.

In an additional bit of hilarious irony, it is now almost impossible to find any information or footage of the PS5 game “Horses 2025”, because the PC game “Horses”, released in 2025 by Italian indie studio Santa Ragione and banned from Steam and Epic (presumably) over its use of nudity, dominates the search results instead. If you haven’t heard of that game yet, or have found yourself approving of its ban from storefronts, I highly recommend reading this article by Aftermath about it. And while I’m on it and because I find it very funny, I’ll add that Santa Ragione did apologize to me personally for inadvertently hijacking horse game search results. For what it’s worth, I forgive them and I support weird, boundary-pushing art games, even if they are horse-themed but don’t contain actual horses.

To get back to the actual “Horses 2025”, what can we learn here? That you should pick more unique titles for your games if you’re a developer, for one. And as a player looking for new horse games to play, that you should keep a watchful eye out for signs of misleading marketing material, reliance on generative AI and store-bought assets, and ask for opinions in the TMQ communities before giving your money to dubious games. On a positive note, the sheer absurdity of Horses 2025 and my breakdown of all that’s wrong with it has at least brought a lot of site traffic and was even linked in a related article over on IGN. Yay, I guess?

Horses 2025 is available on PlayStation 5 and was released on December 12th 2025.