New Horse Game: Eternal Trails – a Hands-Off Horseback Exploration Game

A new game is available in the horse game niche: Eternal Trails is a small exploration game that is designed to run by itself.  

Developer Grow Now! describes the project as a “work background game” – a lightweight and low-resolution program intended to run on your computer as a casual, calm background activity. You can watch your horse explore or control its course yourself. 

Eternal Trails offer vibes more than it does mechanics, but if you’re looking for a chill and hands-off experience on the side, this pixel art riding game might be what you need. Thanks to procedurally generated environments and a handful of different biomes, Eternal Trails offers quite some visual variety. 

Since the game has no user reviews yet at the time of writing, I’ve decided to give Eternal Trails a brief try for myself: as promised by the Store Page, Eternal Trails runs in a small window and works best when just left to run by itself. You can steer the horse using your left and right mouse button, but I found the movement slow to react and sometimes a bit twitchy. The only other possible interactions are looking around to your left and right, and toggling a torch for when night falls over the eternal landscapes. 

The pixel landscapes themselves are simple, but pretty, and even in a few minutes of “playtime” – in my case, letting the game run on my second monitor while typing out my thoughts on it – I saw a nice variety of mountains and meadows, and even a swarm of birds taking flight ahead of my horse. A day-night-cycle provides some variation in lighting and mood. 

The desert biome can get a bit monotonous admittedly, but the good thing about this game is that you can simply direct your attention elsewhere and check back in for a more interesting biome later on. 

There is a certain zen to a game simply walking (or rather cantering) itself through this endless landscape, a certain intrigue to waiting for what might wait behind the next mountain range. 

Will this satisfy what many of my readers ask for from horse games? Probably not. But I always find it lovely to see projects that push the boundaries of what we consider games in the first place, especially if they do it using horses. 

Eternal Trails is available for PC on Steam. It was released on 15th February 2024.