The Legend of Khiimori is OUT NOW in Early Access!

Disclaimer: This article is about a game I work on as a consultant, and have worked on as producer in the past.

The Legend of Khiimori, the Mongolian courier rider game developed by Aesir Interactive and published by Mindscape, releases into Early Access today. While the game is planned for consoles later on, the Early Access phase happens only on PC, through Steam and Epic.

If you’ve missed it so far: I worked on this game as Creative Producer during its early concept phase in 2023 and helped shape the game’s vision very early on. I’m incredibly excited for it to finally release, after a successful crowdfunding campaign and a few delays.

What to expect

Note that due to my involvement as a consultant, I won’t review the game on The Mane Quest. I also feel obliged to add that since I work on multiple projects nowadays, I haven’t actually spent all that much time playing The Legend of Khiimori, so I’m just as curious to see how it turned out as many of you are.

As a few early access reviews from gaming press have already trickled in, I can tell you that in its Early Access version, The Legend of Khiimori won’t be flawless. It’s an ambitious game with a big world and lots of interacting systems, made by a team that’s far smaller and far more limited in its resources than the Red Deads and Death Strandings and Kingdom Comes that the game gets compared to. From what we see so far, players praise Khiimori for its horse animations and gorgeous environments, but criticize technical instability, balancing and NPC animation quality. It’s worth noting that a Day 1 Patch that fixes some of the most pressing issues is already underway and will be live today.

The good news is that through Early Access, Aesir can actually tackle and improve on those fronts – a big difference from Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch back in the day. I dearly hope that even in its early form, The Legend of Khiimori has a lot to offer to horse fans – whenever I play the game, I find a lot of wonderful horsie detail to get lost in, at least. If you want the most polished product possible, it probably makes more sense to wait for further patches and content updates. What I’d selfishly love for everyone to do is to buy the game, post a positive review on Steam, give your critical feedback on Discord and then give Aesir some more time and patience to improve the game further. It may seem counter intuitive to some players, but games that sell and get traction tend to get much more additional investment of time and resources, while receiving Mixed reviews on Launch can drastically harm a game’s visibility and kill its momentum.

The Early Access release of Khiimori marks a significant milestone and huge achievement in our entire genre in any case: it’s definitely the first horse-focused game to receive anywhere near comparable attention from the mainstream gaming press. And I greatly look forward to where else we can go from here.

And now go give this thing a try!