“Horses Deserve to be Main Characters” – Game Announcement & Developer Insight for HORSE CLUB: Ride West
Disclaimer: This article is about a game I am doing consultation work on.
The Horse Club game series by German developer and publisher Wild River Games announces its third entry: HORSE CLUB: Ride West! With Horse Club Adventures from 2021 and Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories, Wild River proved that you can in fact make a solid horse game for kids on a budget these days. I’ve played and reviewed both games (here and here) and while they’re not perfect or the most thrilling experiences for adult players, I sure came away from these with a much more positive impression than most of their direct competitors.
I’ve been in touch with the Wild River team before for interviews and insights, but this time around the team went and hired me to review and give feedback for early story drafts, design plans and horse riding controls. I have not yet played the finished game, but I know some of the thoughts and intentions that went into it and am looking forward to sharing that with you all!
Today, Wild River announces a third horse game using Schleich’s popular toy brand: Horse Club: Ride West invites the player on a Western themed ranch vacation with the Horse Club characters and their horses. To celebrate the announcement, I sat down with Stefan Kummer and Daniel Boos from the Wild River team to learn more about their development process. But first, about the game itself:
Riding West
The HORSE CLUB is visiting the Wild River Ranch! Travel with your friends Hannah, Sofia, Sarah, and Lisa to the Wild West. Explore the vast landscape, help old and new friends, experience exciting adventures on horseback, and win the crown at the Western riding tournament!
Horse Club: Ride West takes place on a Western ranch – the second game we're seeing this year that focuses on Western riding, after a long drought of representation for the riding style. The game promises a “charming, engaging story”, an open world to explore, and a lot of side activities from riding challenges to archery, painting and learning to play the guitar.
What I find particularly noteworthy is that instead of giving you one horse to ride and customize, Horse Club: Ride West will introduce six unique equine characters that you meet and get to know throughout the story! Each of these horses has their own background, and some will have a few issues for you to overcome together before. I keep yapping about how more games should treat horses as characters and living beings rather than speed upgrades with mild stat differences, and I love that the latest Horse Club game decided on this approach.
Sequel or Spin-Off?
Incomplete team photo of the creative minds at Wild River Games
Stefan Kummer is the producer at Wild River Games. “My responsibilities in the company evolve mainly around production planning and organizing communication regarding projects within the company and with external partners,” he explains. I’m also joined by Daniel Boos — he has worked on the previous Horse Club Adventures games as game designer 2D/UI artist, but for Horse Club: Ride West, Daniel also wrote story and dialogue.
Horse Club: Ride West noticeably doesn’t have a “3” in its title, despite it being the third time Wild River and Schleich cooperate on a Horse Club game. “In a way it is a sequel to the previous games,” Stefan explains when I ask about the reasons for that decision. “Characters that have been created for Horse Club Adventures 2 are returning and of course there are still some mechanics that players of previous entries will be familiar with, but we also tried to evolve the series. We worked a lot to improve the player experience in many ways, so it felt natural to drop the 3.”
Daniel adds that “Horses and the Wild West naturally go hand in hand, and since there hadn’t been a Horse Club game set in a western setting yet, we felt it was about time.”
The first two Horse Club games enjoy positive user reviews on Steam.
Although Horse Club: Ride West features various recurring characters from the previous games, Stefan emphasizes that players can absolutely start with this game even if they’re new to the franchise. “From a story perspective there is not really anything players need to know about the previous games,” he says. “But if you like Ride West, we are happy if you check out our other titles.”
A key improvement in Ride West compared to its predecessors is how the open world and story fit together: “In our previous games we had this pretty big open world,” says Stefan, “but the game itself was very linear. There were some sidequests, but as a player I always felt more encouraged to follow the main story line.”
Daniel agrees that apart from the updated art style and Western setting, the overall game structure is the most significant difference: “After the introduction,” he explains, “players are free to explore the world on their own — without glowing objective markers constantly leading them by the nose. That’s something we always wanted to do in the previous games, but we were worried it might be too much for a casual audience, so we never fully explored that potential until now.”
He adds that “basically everything has been rebuilt and improved from the previous games, from the 3D models to the controls to the riding animations.”
Horses and Riding
Western Riding was already a small part of Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories — among a number of other activities. What is new this time though is the control scheme: “This time they’re actually fun to play,” Daniel says with a laugh. “In the previous games, the horse riding controls weren’t really designed for sharp turns around barrels, so we improved them quite a lot in that area.”
The new setting is making itself noticeable in the horse and character customization as well: Daniel promises “western-boho inspired hats, clothing, boots, saddles, reins and more.” My feedback that the bridles in the game’s cover art aren’t actually representative of commonly used Western tack unfortunately came too late in the process, unfortunately.
The team has also made sure to include suitable horses: “Players will be able to choose from a handful of predefined horse breeds, including Quarter Horses, Paint Horses, and Mustangs,” Daniel explains. “And it’s not just a simple texture swap — each horse is designed to resemble its real-world breed, complete with its own personality traits and unique stats.”
Those predefined horses are what I personally consider a standout feature of this game, and one that I greatly enjoyed giving feedback on early on. The Wild River team had those plans well in place by the time I joined though. “Horses deserve to be main characters,” says Daniel when I ask for insights into the decision. “I think you feel a much stronger connection to a horse in a video game when they each have distinct characteristics and personalities. Horses shouldn’t feel like cars. When you can fully customize your horse — including its coat — you can create your ultimate dream horse on one hand, but on the other, you also lose the uniqueness between individual horses.”
Another big topic in my critique of the previous games was the use of Horse Animset Pro in all its flaws — though the second Horse Club Adventures game already made key improvements to the animations. In an interview with the team in 2022, they even voiced their intention to eventually move away from the asset pack entirely. That has not quite come to be, but more work has gone into improving the horse animation: “The newest version of Horse Animset Pro still serves as the foundation,” says Daniel, “but this time we have a full-time animator who refined many aspects — from the rider animations to the mounting sequences. Features like the western riding drift animations were created completely from scratch, based on study of real western riding footage.”
At the time of writing this, I haven’t seen the final animations yet, but I can at the very least confirm that I provided a bunch of slow motion close up gifs of barrel racing footage to the team!
“Improving the animations and creating a better riding experience was surely one of our main goals and we certainly poured a lot of hours into that aspect of the game,” adds Stefan on the topic.
Production and Process
To get a good idea of what the updated horse riding should feel like in Horse Club: Ride West, Daniel played a lot of other horse games. He names Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch as an inspiration for horse controls including sideways drifting, The Ranch of Rivershine for considerations related to leveling up horses through riding, and Barbie Horse Trails as a relevant recent competitor to get a good impression of. A perhaps unexpected inspiration came from Crimson Desert “Because it also features horse drifting… along with pretty much every other mechanic,” Daniel laughs.
That the developers of a new kids’ horse game have played other games in the horse game niche should not be newsworthy, and yet I love to see that it happens. When I first started talking to the developers of kids’ horse games in the early days of The Mane Quest, I often got the impression that these games were made without much awareness of what was already represented in the genre. I love that — at least in this particular case — that tendency seems to be changing.
Wild River takes their horse game development seriously, and their production is quite efficient: Stefan explains that the development of Horse Club: Ride West began around Easter 2025, after the release of their previous cooperation with Schleich, Eldrador Creatures: Shadowfall. Ideas for the game had already been in discussion the previous months though. “We started production with a team of five and added an additional programmer during the summer,” says Stefean. “In January of this year we hired a QA person, and we have three additional testers that work part-time for us.”
Daniel adds more of his thoughts on making a game that you’re not really the target audience for as a developer: “You constantly ask: what do players actually want? Do they enjoy the freedom of an open world, or do they prefer the clarity of a more guided experience with quest markers leading the way? Are minigames like archery or guitar meaningful additions to a horse riding game - or are they simply fun extras? And is the writing charming… or just cringe?”
He does say that that’s part of what makes development interesting for him, despite the challenges. “What matters to us is that we didn’t just copy-paste the last game. We tried new ideas, took some creative risks, and built a different kind of Horse Club experience that we hope players can truly immerse themselves in.”
Outlook
Since I’m biased as a consultant, I’ll open the commentary up to you all: What do you make of the Horse Club: Ride West announcement? Will you be picking this up? What do you think of the previous two Horse Club games by Wild River? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
If you have more questions for the Wild River Games team, you’ll actually be able to chat with them directly! Daniel Boos agreed to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the /r/GamesWithHorses subreddit! The AMA will take place on July 6th 2026 at 3pm CEST. Subscribe to the subreddit or follow The Mane Quest on the social media of your choice to get a reminder when it’s live!
Horse Club: Ride West is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch on October 9th 2026. You can already wishlist the game on Steam!