The Indie Horse Game Revolution: 6 Upcoming Passion Projects to keep your Eyes on
The vast majority of what we call “horse games” belong into one very specific niche: they are traditionally published, retail market oriented adventure or simulation games with a target audience of girls between ages 8 and 12, give or take.
These games - examples include My Riding Stables, Horse Club Adventures, the Windstorm games - are usually created with a fixed development budget and release date in mind from the start, and efforts to include player feedback and engage with the target audience are absolutely minimal more often than not. As regular readers will know from my reviews and dev features, these games have been seeing some improvements over the years in their own right, but still one cannot help but wonder… What if instead, there were horse games made by people who really cared? Games made not for kids but for equestrians?
A new Generation of Horse Games
And that is where the projects on today’s list come in: six work-in-progress horse games in various stages of development, made by people who really like horses and who want this niche to offer more.
Rather than aiming at the parent-and-child retail audience, these games mostly target teen and adult horse game players through digital downloads. They don’t have industry funding but run crowd-backing campaigns on Patreon and Kickstarter. Instead of having edutainment game veterans at their helms, they are led by passionate young industry newbies who try to make up for what they lack in experience in sheer dedication.
These projects are made possible by the wider democratization of game development that has taken place over the past decade or so: game making tools that are widely available and well-documented and digital storefronts that allow self-publishing.
To the best of my knowledge, all the games in this list are planned to be pay-to-play PC releases, with some of them having console ambitions later down the road.
Let’s have a look at what’s out there:
The Games
1. The Ranch of Rivershine
By merit of being created by a dev with publishing experience, Rivershine has a certain advantage over the other projects in this list - more on that in my announcement article. With a 3D open world, Rivershine does signify a quite remarkable increase in scope compared to Cozy Bee Games’ previous titles, and some of the riding gameplay and animations don’t quite convince me yet, but I still consider it the most promising project on here for my own personal taste. Particularly the promise that you visit NPCs like a carpenter in town in order to upgrade your buildings give me big Stardew Valley vibes and that is just a dream come true for me.
Core features include the exploration of meadows and mountain paths, cross country competitions, breeding and foal training, befriending townsfolk and cultivating fruit and crops as fodder.
Links: Steam | Dev Website
Further Reading: Announcement & Developer Q&A
2. Astride
Astride places itself in the Adventure, RPG and Simulation Genres on its steam page, and distinguishes itself by its Scandinavian setting and inclusion of local horse breeds, with a particular focus on Icelandic horses and gaited riding. Open world exploration, quests and stable customisation are confirmed, while a multitude of other features such as breeding and western riding are vaguely planned for later updates or DLC.
With a successful Kickstarter Campaign behind them, the Raidho Games team is planning to launch in Early Access on Steam later this year. A roadmap from July shows plans for different disciplines, PvP matchmaking and more.
Links: Linktree | Steam | Kickstarter | Website
Further Reading: Kickstarter Announcement & Developer Q&A
3. Tales of Rein Ravine
Known as “horsegame.exe” for a time during its early development, Tales of Rein Ravine has been making some waves on Instagram and Tiktok primarily with gameplay footage of the jumping, and some impressively layered animations where horses toss or shake their heads while approaching a jump, giving the steeds a relatively unusual amount of character.
Although the game’s description on Patreon promises “a variety of horses with unique temperaments and a captivating story” to be core features eventually, what’s been shown so far seems to focus primarily on the riding mechanics themselves, which claim to be somewhat more advanced and complex. A playable demo is available for free right here, if you want to try those mechanics for yourself already.
4. Unbridled: That Horse Game
Unbridled has gone by its rather generic subtitle until just a few weeks ago and only recently settled on a more unique name – a move I highly encourage for various reasons outlined here.
Unbridled: That Horse Game doesn’t have a very concrete feature list yet, but distinguishes itself from the rest of the projects here by billing itself as primarily multiplayer and including mounted archery as a mechanic. The Steam description teases breeding, western riding, distinct horse personalities and PvP competition.
5. Horse Project
The last two games on the list are ones that look to be at an even earlier stage of development, with even less concrete information or gameplay footage available apart from early prototype material.
Horse Project – yes, that’s a working title – is set to be a simulator with RPG elements that promises to focus on the relationship and communication between human and horse. Its creator is a student in their late teens currently working on the project by themself.
The project’s instagram showcases a few different horse breeds already, some piaffe and passage animations, as well as a quite impressive example of lateral locomotion.
Links: Instagram | Website | Concept Doc
6. Horse Life Simulator
Horse Life Simulator aspires to be a “real time, open world, RPG, building, non-quest based, simulator”, as per the description on the project’s Patreon page. Its developers are a game designer and programmer couple from Norway, with a shared dream of making a realistic horse game.
Fredriksen Games promises to focus on realism in horse behavior, horse care, riding and training, but doesn’t offer any public insights yet into concrete mechanics. From the project’s Instagram page, we can gleam that breeding is planned, including an interesting steady growth morph from foal to adult horse. Other posts showcase some very solid jumping animations as well as a harness and carriage setup.
Common Concerns
I love to watch these projects grow and evolve and I gladly give them exposure on here. That does not mean that I have complete faith in all the projects on this list, however. On the contrary, I’d actually be very surprised if more than half the games on here are playable in their promised scope within the next three years.
The concerns I have apply to almost all of them: They’re highly ambitious projects, made by first time developers – Rivershine being the notable exception as mentioned – and they often don’t have a very clear scope or focus beyond “horse game”, which will make it harder for the team to find their market in the wider industry.
They may well be buggy, unstable, unpolished, badly tutorialized or otherwise janky, because all of those things are just incredibly common in debut games made by inexperienced teams.
Even the ones that have successful crowdfunding behind them are almost certainly underfunded for what they want to achieve and only getting made because the people making them really want to make them.
What that means for us as an audience is that we should temper our expectations: that we should follow and support these games, but ease up on the hope that any individual upcoming game will be the perfect horse game many people dream of, with realistic animations, complex equine personalities, a huge open world, online multiplayer, genetically accurate breeding, competitions in every discipline, and fifty hours of quests on top.
That one should maintain a certain healthy skepticism when following games in early development applies to all genres, but in a niche as starved for quality projects as ours, I see a bit of an additional tendency for people to get overly attached to ultra early prototype footage.
Those expectations are bound to lead to disappointment, and we’ve seen too often how quickly that disappointment about a game not being everything players hoped for leads to toxicity towards developers and other players.
Sweet Potential
Now that I’ve gotten my reasons for hesitation and out of the way though, let’s have a look at the upsides:
Every game on this list will add a fresh perspective to our genre that we simply haven’t seen before. From quirky details like the riding instructor swearing at you in the Tales of Rein Ravine demo to Astride’s promises to include gaited riding, to Ranch of Rivershine’s wonderful Stardew-esque life sim vibes with its promised townfolk interactions, all the projects in this list are bound to reinvent parts of the genre in one way or another.
If any of them sell well and receive very positive reviews, their success may be a sign for publishers to invest more into the teen and adult PC-gaming audience for this type of game. That these projects are obviously born from a passion for the equestrian topic doesn’t mean they’ll be good, but it does significantly increase the chances for the developers to tackle riding and horse care with the background of real life experience and to avoid the basic mistakes like getting coat colors and other details wrong.
Even should every game on this list turn out to be mediocre at best, they will show us – the players, the reviewers, other developers, publishers – a wealth of entirely new do’s and don’ts for horse game projects still further in the future.
What else?
This is not necessarily an exhaustive list. I know there are a bunch of you out there with concept art, game design docs, prototypes and lots of big ideas. If you believe your project deserves to be a seventh spot on this list, then by all means do reach out – especially if it’s with some concrete info and a press kit!
I can also not write about upcoming horse games without mentioning my own: Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is not an indie project and doesn’t share exactly the same risks as I’ve outlined above, but I definitely expect it to be an important next step in advancing our genre and setting the bar higher than it was before. If you’ve missed it so far, learn about Horse Tales right here:
I will definitely keep following and supporting the projects in this list as best I can – be that with TMQ posts, advice and consultation or a crowdfunding contribution here or there – without attaching all of my heart and hopes to them. I would love to see this market get mixed up a bit and the fact that there are enough projects to make an actual list of WIP indie horse games is already a wonderful step into the right direction.
Remember to add upcoming games to your Wish List on Steam if you can! This helps the games get additional visibility!
Astride is a horse game inspired by Scandinavian environments and horse breeds currently on Kickstarter. I’ve been watching the project with both excitement and a bit of scepticism throughout, so the crowdfunding launch is the perfect opportunity to take a closer look – and to have a chat with Raidho’s Co-Founder and Lead 3D-Artist Mathilde Kvernland.