My Horse: Bonded Spirits – A Newly Announced Horse Game and Why I'm Skeptical About it

My Horse: Bonded Spirits is an upcoming horse game created by Games Incubator from Poland. The game’s Steam page and announcement trailer first went up on April 13th 2023. My Horse: Bonded Spirits does not yet have a precise release date, but is scheduled for 2024. Let’s take a look:

In My Horse: Bonded Spirits, you – come on, you know where this is going, say it with me – inherit a run-down stud farm and rebuild it. While that premise is far from original, the steam description also teases a few characteristics we haven’t seen that often yet in the horse game niche, like managing employees at your own stud farm and completing tasks for villagers. 

A saddle selection in the trailer lets the player choose between a Dressage, Jumping and Western saddle, but the only type of competitive riding actually shown so far is Show Jumping. Whether more disciplines will be part of the game or whether the saddles represent an aesthetic choice only is currently not known. 

The announcement trailer features a handful of custom-animated (and possibly pre-rendered?) clips that I assume don’t represent actual live gameplay. We don’t see the horse animation in detail yet, but I’m fairly confident that the game is not using the ever-present Horse Animset Pro pack, which I’m always happy about. There’s not enough horse animation shown for me to really judge the quality, but apart from a wonky-looking step forward at 0:14 I also don’t see any egregious missteps yet. 

Other features appear to include repair work, jumping competitions, and bonding with the horse, though it’s again not quite clear yet how the latter will actually play out in gameplay. 

All in all the trailer definitely looks like “a horse game”. At first glance I was skeptical about this coming out of nowhere, I’m not loving the generic title and I would say that once again the environments look a lot better than the horses themselves. On the plus side though, there’s definitely plenty of room for a new barn management simulator style game with a realistic art style, and I figured I’d happily follow this for more information. After some further investigation into the game’s publisher, I have serious doubts about whether the final game will look anything like this trailer however. Let’s look at why.

Bonding with horses appears to be a core feature, but the announcement trailer doesn’t give a lot of insight into how it’ll actually work.

These clips/cutscenes do look impressively high quality, but I have my doubts whether this represents the state of the game itself.

Who is Making This? 

Steam lists the developer and Publisher as Games Incubator: A company with supposedly 92 Steam games in their portfolio, though many of these are actually bundles of individual titles in every combination. It sounds like a very “Quantity over Quality” approach at first glance, but many of Games Incubator’s products average positive reviews, with the top titles like Car Mechanic sporting an impressive 18’000 positive reviews. 

Games Incubator is a Subsidiary of PlayWay SA, one of the biggest game publishers in Poland and the investor behind a variety of highly successful simulator games, including House Flipper*. Games Incubator have previously forayed into the horse game niche with a Horse DLC to their Animal Shelter simulation game. The Horse Shelter DLC looks overall unappealing to me thanks to Mixed (46% positive) reviews, HAP-animations and a rather jarring user interface. The fact that horse halters are called “leading harness” in the game doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that anyone behind this has equestrian knowledge to lean on. 

*House Flipper, incidentally, has just received a Farm Flipper DLC, which includes horses. Those are again based on HAP, and rather limited in their interactions.

These images are from Horse Shelter DLC, made by Games Incubator

You know you’re in for a treat when even the promotional screenshots have clipping errors front and center

Since Games Incubator and PlayWay SA work with different dev teams and freelancers however, it’s hard to guess whether anyone the team making My Horse: Bonded Spirits has actual overlap with any of the aforementioned titles. PlayWay SA appears to have a history of announcing games under subsidiaries and labels in order to obfuscate just how many games they have in development.

EDIT: A developer from the Games Incubator Discord has confirmed that My Horse: Bonded Spirits is being made by the same development team as Animal Shelter. /

A Different Approach

Seeing the announcement for My Horse: Bonded Spirits immediately reminded me of another supposedly upcoming horse with a very similar-looking feature list. Horse Shelter 2022 (not related to the Horse DLC for Animal Shelter mentioned above!) was first announced in late 2020 (then as Horse Shelter 2021) and has since been drip-feeding its followers the occasional dev log while repeatedly delaying the expected release date. Further investigation shows that Horse Shelter 2022 is apparently also published by PlayWay (they posted the initial announcement on their YouTube channel), although the SimulaM label once again obfuscates the association.

Horse Shelter 2022’s promotional material includes at least three different horse models of varying quality.

A Horse Shelter 2022 dev log from February 2021 announced using new animations (it was HAP) and showcased horses without manes or tails

Admittedly, the newly announced My Horse: Bonded Spirits looks a lot better than any footage I’ve seen of Horse Shelter 2022, thanks to more competently put together UI and significantly less janky horse animation. I speculate at a similarity though: 

While many Indie Game developers who follow a concrete vision work on one project at a time and create a Steam page for it once the game is ready to show, there is a different approach: Some game creators put together multiple Steam pages from jumbled together assets and clips, and then use Steam metrics like wishlists, followers and discussion activity to gauge player interest and decide which games to actually invest time into on this basis. 

The practice is ethically dubious because it effectively produces concept art in motion and mispresents it as actual gameplay footage. It is also technically in violation of Steam’s rules for Steam Pages, which state:

Your screenshots must only contain gameplay. This means avoid using concept art, pre-rendered cinematic stills, or images that contain awards, marketing copy, or written product descriptions.

Despite this violation – or perhaps because it is hard to prove? – Games Incubator’s parent company PlayWay allegedly does this a lot. This article by Game Developer gives an excellent summary of the issue.

I have a strong feeling that this “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks” approach to game development is what’s happening in the case of My Horse: Bonded Spirits. Horse Shelter 2022’s roughly 6500 Steam followers are comparatively impressive considering the look of the game. For comparison: Astride has 9500 Steam followers and The Ranch of Rivershine has a bit over 4000 – these numbers can be found on the Steam Database. Could it be that this relative success at visibly low effort convinced a developer like Games Incubator to try a similar approach? Or is My Horse: Bonded Spirits actually a second attempt by the same people at PlayWay at getting more attention from the same target audience by making a significantly better first impression?

UPDATE 21.04.2023: I’ve gotten in touch with a Community Manager from the Games Incubator Discord. They confirmed to me that the footage in the announcement trailer is indeed pre-rendered: “The trailer of our game is made on the basis of the assumptions of our upcoming game and we tried our best to show how the game will look like after the release,” Community Manager MeRyga tells me. “What we show now is our announcement trailer, which has now some of the gameplay elements, but the game is still in the fairly early stage of production. However, the whole trailer was created in cooperation with familiar developers, who made sure that the UI of the game, and the mechanical solutions were shown in the announcement trailer.”

MeRyga adds that a demo of My Horse: Bonded Spirits will be forthcoming. /

TL;DR this looks really impressive but I do not yet trust the game itself to live up to this promotional material because I believe everything shown so far is pre-rendered specifically for the trailer.

I’d of course love to be proven wrong and find an actual quality game in My Horse: Bonded Spirits sometime in 2024. For now, I’m definitely keeping my eyes peeled and my expectations low. 

But I do find it very interesting that next to our traditionally published horse games, our exciting new indie passion project horse games and our competently made but dubiously monetized mobile horse games, we’re apparently getting a new flavor game in the niche with the intransparently produced Steam-exclusive and heavily premade-asset-reliant horse game that may or may not actually be released depending on wish list reception. While that’s not really where I see our little genre’s future and potential, I do take the existence of these titles as evidence that the wider industry has picked up on “horse game lovers are an underserved market that can be capitalized on”. 

It’s a further sign that after the golden age of the 00s, we’re seeing something of a Horse Game Renaissance at the moment – but that the playing field and who gets to participate has significantly changed in the meantime. For better and for worse.

My Horse: Bonded Spirits is planned to release on Steam in 2024.