Review: Horse Club Adventures – A Wholesome Summer Retreat with Suboptimal Animations and Controls

Horse Club Adventures is a multiplatform adventure game created by Wild River Games under the Schleich brand. The game’s setting and characters are based on the Schleich Horse Club toy line which enjoys significant popularity in Germany and its neighboring countries. 

German publisher Wild River Games, previously known to TMQ readers from the two Windstorm titles, has only recently built up the in-house development team that now created Horse Club Adventures.

Like many games in this genre, Horse Club Adventures is aimed at young girls and promises exciting adventures, thrilling races and solving mysteries with the power of friendship. Let’s take a look at how well it lives up to these claims. 

Welcome to Lakeside

The game sets the player character and her horse up for a Summer vacation at Lakeside, in the idyllic home of Mr and Mrs Kramer. You start by choosing a name for yourself and your horse and putting together your starting look from some cute – though for now relatively limited – customization options. 

An introductory cutscene lets you peek at the locations you’ll get to visit in the game and presents you with your new friends: Hannah, Sarah, Sofia, Lisa and their horses eagerly await you as their summer visitor and promise they’ll introduce you to Granny at the Old Mill, Tom and Emily at the Cups and Saddles Café and Old Anton, the region’s most ancient tree. 

Although the game’s budget limitations are quickly noticeable – there are few animations in the cutscene, and dialogue consists of unvoiced text boxes – it is obvious that this story is told with care. The setup is very wholesome and lovely, the intention obviously to simply let you enjoy some fun times with these friendly people. Naturally, I personally spent much of my first hour of playtime overanalysing the horse controls and movements instead of letting Sarah show me about the ranch, but more on that in a moment. 

The game uses a calendar structure for its progression: Every day, you have a number of quests available, after which you can continue to roam the world freely. Once you’re ready to bring your horse back to the Lakeside paddock, you can feed it and end your day. This structure is simple, but also provides a perfect framing for how much time passes in the story and to aid the general the vacation feeling. The first handful of days are very much focused on casually meeting all the characters and locations, which makes the narrative stakes or any sort of conflict basically nonexistent – at least at the beginning. 

Horses, Riding, Animation

I admit that after reviewing horse games for two and a half years, I have a bit of an obsession with looking at horse animations from every possible angle while trying to evaluate their quality. As a result, I get very frustrated when a game’s camera or controls limit my horse viewing angles. This is not just an occupational hazard of running this website though: many members of the community agree that actually, we all really like looking at horses and get annoyed when games don’t let us do that.  

Even recording these clips without running into something took me a bit of practice.

Seeing yourself from the side means constantly course-correcting.

The equine locomotion in Horse Club Adventures ranges from cringey to pretty, for an average “alright, I guess”. All the necessary gaits are there, though the transitions make them blend into each other. This means that you can move at a weird half-trot, half-canter, if you actively try to. 

I’ts not always this bad but ugh. Yikes.

The worst offender in terms of animation/rigging errors are the constantly bent knees however: an unfortunate feature of the Horse Animset Pro animation asset, upon which the HCA animations are based. 

Animators, I know idle anis have to exaggerate some movements but please stop randomly bending horses’ forelegs for them.

A horse generally only bends both its forelegs at once when it is rearing, jumping, lying down or in the process of lying down. A bent foreleg can not carry weight. When coming down onto the ground – be it from rearing, jumping or just taking a step – a horse’s foreleg is straight, the force of the impact being absorbed via the leg’s other joints. The mistake is unfortunately common – this short instructional video of how to do it right is pinned to my Twitter profile for a reason.

The same hesitance to include outstretched forelegs in the animation also results in the trot, canter and gallop looking slightly off, because it never looks quite like the legs reach far enough ahead to justify the speed. Properly seeing your horse move is made very difficult by the fact that moving the camera shifts your directional controls, so you can’t really move in a straight line while looking on from the side. 

And speaking of controls: the only way to move at a walk or trot is to carefully push your joystick only slightly, which makes it practically impossible to move at a leisurely pace without explicitly concentrating on it. When playing on mouse and keyboard, staying at a walk or trot is not possible at all. Similarly, you slow down by letting go of the stick, which means that there is no way to stop quickly. It’s all not too bad, but not my favorite control scheme either.  

To move at a fast gallop, you hold the right trigger, which slowly drains your horse’s sprint bar. That sprint bar and its functionality, while alright in principle, ended up as something of a pet peeve for me in my playthrough: There’s the fact that the centered UI is suboptimal for readability and that the color of the emptying bar is barely visible against the ocre of the roads, but those I can forgive. 

What I found genuinely frustrating is that the sprint bar drains slowly enough that sprinting quickly becomes what you perceive as your “regular” speed, which then makes it tedious to have to wait for the bar to recharge if you have a long distance to travel. This is a small but annoying balance issue that may well have fixed by making the sprint’s effect be stronger, but last less long. 

Races without obstacles and races against NPCs as part of story missions grow frustrating and boring because there is absolutely no strategy to when you should sprint and when is a good time to recharge. You just hold the button until you run out, then wait. Any attempt at making this stamina management more interesting might have greatly reduced my annoyance at having to travel long distances in the game. During obstacle races, you are motivated to constantly sprint in order to save time, but then the jumps slow you down in comparison, which just makes the whole thing feel less than fluid. 

That you get additional sprint capacity by doing your horse care chores – feeding, hoof cleaning and coat brushing – is an absolutely solid principle, if only the sprint itself were more satisfying to use. 

Speaking of said horse care: the hoof cleaning and coat brushing minigames are pretty much “standard”, but they are competently implemented, with satisfactory feedback for interactions. It helps that they are entirely optional rather than being forced upon the player. 

Once you end an in-game day, you can bring your horse hay and water in its paddock – this too, is optional, with the alternative being to say that your horse has already eaten enough. The sprint bonus from feeding lasts all of the next day, which makes it a much better time investment than the grooming. My only gripe here is that once you return the horse to the paddock, their saddle and bridle stay on. Let my poor horses chill without their tack on, damn it. There is already an explicit confirmation that you’re done with riding for the day, so disabling the tack from there until the next morning would have been an absolutely minimal development effort.

The World and What To Find In It

The open world around the Lakeside stables is bright and colorful, from beach to quarry, from forests to waterfalls. There were multiple occasions where I found myself taking screenshots simply because the environment around me and my horse was so lovely. Horse Club Adventures here noticeably differentiates itself from the cheap competition like Bibi & Tina or My Riding Stables: the world is pretty all around, and no area feels tacked on with low effort texturing and nothing to see. 

The games main and side quests take you all over the map, while collectible customization packages, racing courses and photo spots provide additional motivation for detours. The background music adjusts based on which area of the world you’re in, with a lovely mysterious-sounding forest tune and some more cheerful tracks near stables and cafés.  

The one thing that occasionally frustrated me is that the world quickly reveals itself to be less open than one might initially assume: many parts of the forest are effectively walls, and long rock faces can only be ascended or descended at specific points. As a result, the overhead compass is not always helpful to really tell which way to take to get to your next quest marker, and you may quickly find yourself riding long detours around untraversable patches of rock or forest. This caused less issues as I got more used to frequently consulting the map rather than just following my nose, but is still something that I see potential for improvement in.

As another little side note: I wish there were more places where the jump button could actively be used to get past obstacles and take shortcuts - the usefulness of jumping is otherwise limited to races and a few pasture fences.

Narrative and Quest Mechanics

During the first few days, many quests boil down to riding to a new location and meeting someone. It is all cute and nice, but not particularly interesting. Since I was relatively short on time, I genuinely considered putting the game down around day 6 or 7 and simply telling you all that it was very cute and nice but not for me. 

Instead, I pushed through and found myself enjoying the second half of the game quite a bit. Once a bit of tension arises due to some mysteriously appearing trash and a strangely simultaneous sickness among the Lakeside neighbors, I did end up being quite intrigued by the narrative. 

I won’t spoil any of the story beats, but what I really appreciated is that characters who are set up early return to play key roles. The narrative is competently crafted in a way that is not inherently spectacular, but noteworthy when considering the competition. The first Windstorm game had a similar budget to Horse Club Adventures, but the latter puts its resources to vastly better use. 

Mechanically, the quests are relatively shallow. Many objectives boil down to “go there, talk to person, go back”, which would be fine if there were more to do in between, but ends up feeling a bit barebones. The one type of quest I really enjoyed where the kind where you have to search an area for some hidden object: Unlike many other games – be they for kids or adults – Horse Club Adventures actually lets you search for a hidden thing with your eyes. The target object only occasionally giving off a sparkle, instead of solving the riddle for you by placing a completely obvious marker. The search quests feel significantly more satisfying as a result. 

Horse Club Adventures also demonstrates how to casually include gay representation in a completely child-friendly way with Mr. O’Neill and his husband Richard. Perhaps some other horse games should take notes.

Other characters treat Tori as the stereotypical mean girl with the rich dad, but honestly she does nothing in this game that warrants that dislike. #ToriDidNothingWrong

Races

The world contains a variety of racing tracks, but their implementation left me frustrated. Once you’ve interacted with a race and selected a difficulty, there seems to be no way of cancelling it. Some races lead you long ways around the map or into one direction, while others are brief and lead you back to their starting points, but there is no way to know what you’re getting into before starting them. 

As a result, I found myself avoiding races almost entirely, because the few times I started any, they either took way too long to be fun, or led me somewhere completely different than where I wanted to go. Much of that frustration would easily have been avoided by showing a preview of the race track on the map before starting it, which makes me personally just go “ugh, why did no one notice this”. 

The story eventually includes a showjumping style race that I found vastly more interesting and challenging than the ones where you simply follow sweeping paths, and I retroactively longed for more of that. 

Races can be played in three difficulty levels.

Timing your jumps right in races gains you 3 seconds off your score.

Technical Matters

Shortly after the game’s release, multiple players of the Nintendo Switch version reported crashes. Those who follow along in the TMQ communities will have heard some insight into how this bug slipped by the Quality Assurance team, and that Wild River Games has put in some weekend shifts to find and fix the matter. 

In my own playthrough on PC, I experienced no bugs to speak of. There are some faulty behaviors, like that NPCs sometimes take oddly long to actually enter the target area they need to be in for you to continue a quest, or that their pathfinding is sometimes off when they follow you, but those are generally worked around by simply waiting a moment. 

In terms of controls, the game makes a lot of strange choices. With keyboard and mouse, any of the usual and useful shortcuts are missing, and the fact that you’re able to play without a gamepad at all seems like an afterthought. The experience is much better with a controller, but there are some odd choices there too, such as having to control the menu with the joystick but not the dpad. Early on I also kept skipping dialogue by accident because I expected one button tap to make all the text appear, and only the second tap to continue to the next dialogue box.

One of the more noticeable examples of awkward translation choices.

Menu navigation is fine in some submenus, pretty bad in others.

On the game map, I missed an option to zoom out any further and be able to see the whole map at once. What I appreciated on the other hand is that the game lets you save at any place and time, which made it much more pleasant to start new days or quests without having to consider them a big time commitment. 

The English translation of the game texts is fine, with a few awkward phrasings and obviously German sentence structures remaining. The accented voice acting for the main characters has a certain charm, but unfortunately the voice lines all have the exact same inflection regardless of whether a character is currently talking about who will adopt the neighbors’ kitten or about the fate of the tournament which they trained all summer for.

Progress and Second Impressions

An unexpected highlight of the game for me was the customization aspect. A variety of styles and colors can be unlocked for horse and rider, including hairdos, manes and tails, pants, shirts, saddle blankets and coat colors. Both horse and rider can be completely redesigned at any time using the customization stations in the world. As new options became available, I found myself having a lot of fun mixing up my look entirely, playing matchy-matchy with accessories to create the most stylish combo in all of Lakeside, and even putting together an in-game cosplay outfit for Link and Epona.  

This joy was dampened slightly once again by suboptimal camera controls: it is frustratingly impossible to take a good picture of your look, since you cannot really angle the camera for horse and rider to be well visible in a screenshot. Something like a free photo camera for screenshots à la Star Stable or some pre-arranged poses like in Rival Stars would be an incredibly welcome addition here. 

There were various points, especially in the early game, where I stopped playing for the day because I didn’t feel like doing another “follow this NPC to that location where you’ve been three times before already” quest. I found it easier to play longer sessions in a row once the story really picked up, but your mileage for that may vary. 

I know from my talk with the game’s producer Michael Hengst – more on that in an upcoming dev feature – that the writing team took their time to explore the Horse Club Adventure lore, to read the existing books and consume various related media. Even though I’m not too familiar with the franchise, I do believe that this attention to detail is noticeable in the characters and their writing. 

Speaking of the Horse Club brand: Naturally, this game exists in part as advertising for Schleich and its toys. Even so, I was positively surprised when I actually went to have a look at Horse Club toy sets and discovered that a variety of structures such as grooming post, obstacles and café look exactly like their toy model counterparts. Even as someone with no previous interest to buy more horse toys than I already have, I found myself longingly browsing the Schleich product lineup. 

For children who are already in possession of figurines or objects from the Horse Club universe, I imagine that seeing these represented in the game with such accuracy will be a very cool enhancement of the gaming experience.   

The grooming post is just one of many objects…

… that has been recreated in the game in detail.

In Conclusion

I had some genuine fun with Horse Club Adventures, and am very glad that I now have something enjoyable to recommend the next time anyone asks me about good horse games for kids. For adult players, the game may not be incredibly interesting, but if you’re just looking for a chill time on horseback in a nice-looking open world, you can certainly do a lot worse than this one. 

Horse Club Adventures demonstrates some quite remarkable progress on part of Wild River Games as a publisher when compared to the 2017 Windstorm game with a similar budget. The game also leaves competitors like the Bibi & Tina games far behind in the dirt, showing what a licensed horse game title can look like with some care and resources put into it. What remains to be seen is how HCA performs against its more direct competitor Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure, and I look forward to comparing the two.

By itself, Horse Club Adventures is a slightly wonky, but overall cute and wholesome game experience that brings up some lovely farm vacation feelings.

Horse Club Adventures was released on May 27th 2021 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. A Demo Version for PC is available here. (warning: direct download link)