ROAM is an Open World Wild Horse Simulator and There's a Free Demo Available Now!

Update 24.10.2024: ROAM now has a Steam page! Make sure to go and add the game to your wishlist if you’re interested in it!

“What about a horse game where you play AS THE HORSE"?” is a demand I see in the TMQ-Communities quite often. When people imagine a game like this, they often start hoping for survival gameplay, complex herd dynamics and some sort of Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron vibe.

ROAM - The Horse Game is a WIP-game that takes this “play as the horse” idea as its base line, but then twists it into a slightly different direction: mischief and mayhem. Think Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game. Considering the explosive success of those titles and my years of market research into why we absolutely need more horse games, the business case honestly writes itself.

Solo developer Gen is a college student and self-described newbie game developer. “I was a complete horse girl growing up and I played every horse game I could get my hands on,” she describes herself on Patreon. Gen has been working on the ROAM prototype in her free time for not even two months and is launching a free demo today. In the Demo, you can create your own custom low-poly horse, gather a herd around yourself and explore an open world to free captured horses and mess with townspeople. She posts her progress on TikTok and Patreon, where Spirit-inspired gameplay compilations like this one have been getting a lot of attention.

The demo lets you sleep and graze to recharge your energy and hunger bar.

The Canyon environments definitely help with the Spirit vibes.

Gen names Grand Theft Auto and Goat Simulator as inspirations, which is a wonderfully fresh take on our niche if you ask me. I’ve only given the demo a quick try so far, but I definitely see a lot potential in the idea, especially with a little bit more polish and UX improvements. For a project less than two months into development by someone without much gamedev experience, there’s already quite a lot to play around with, and ROAM has the sort of instantly recognizable USPs that I often find missing in Indie Horse Games.
The game currently uses Horse Animset Pro for its horse animations, which I’ve complained about on various occasions as regular readers will know. But honestly, quick prototyping with fresh ideas is about the best use case for such assets, and helps make game development significantly more accessible for first timers like Gen.

Gen tells me that she’s currently working on implementing breeding mechanics, and wild animals that chase you, though those features are not part of the demo yet.

Although Gen has set up a Patreon for her game, the membership is entirely free and is intended to stay that way, she tells me via email. Eventually, Gen would like to make back the money she spent on the assets by selling the game, but those plans are not too concrete yet.
It’s a great opportunity to give your love and support to someone bringing fresh energy into our genre in any case – while remembering of course that any first time solo dev will always have certain limitations and that we shouldn’t get our hopes impossibly high.

To try the demo for yourself, you can join ROAM’s Patreon for free and download a .zip file from there. Please note that downloading an unvetted .zip or .exe file from someone’s website always carries more risk than downloading games from widely trusted sources such as Steam. I personally haven’t had any issues with the demo however. The Patreon post with the download also includes a PDF with technical information like system requirements, common issues and a Google form to submit feedback!

ROAM - The Horse Game is in an early prototype stage. A free Demo can be found here, concrete release plans for other platforms are not known yet. For updates, follow ROAM on Patreon (free) or TikTok.

ROAM comes with a built-in screenshot tool for taking UI-free screenshots, which is honestly about the best word of mouth marketing tool you can put into an early test version.