A horse game has gone viral and a horse game expert feels vindicated

Alice Ruppert cracked a self-deprecating joke as friends and peers discovered how much she thought about the depiction of horses in video games.

“People said, ‘Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who cared about horses in games.’

“No, you’re not,” she replied. “There are several dozen of us.”

Ruppert never took these calculations entirely seriously. He has been creating horse games for cheerful players for years. And through a blog about virtual horses, Mane’s taskgathered a community that identified hundreds of developed horse games over the last five decades.

The creators of the online horse game certainly know this Stable Star boast over 600,000 players per month.

Nevertheless, it was a good statement, fueled by frustration with the neglect she had long noticed that many game studios showed to the virtual horses they designed.

It’s just not a phrase she can operate as willingly anymore – not since September, when she posted a 14-second clip that changed the latest horse game she’s involved in, Gale: The Legend of Chiimoriin one of the most watched games scheduled for 2025.

“We are creating a game in which you play the role of a courier rider in 13th century Mongolia,” she said. – he wrote on Twitter/X two months ago.

“No fighting, just you, the horses you have tamed, bred and trained, and the vast wilderness.

“Would you play this?”

The results: 140,000 likes, 15.6 million views of the clip, and, as Ruppert told me, “a very, very significant number of wishlists” on Steam.

Ruppert has loved horses throughout her life. She rode them as a child and grew up playing horse video games (with Tomb Raider AND Sims), and in 2015, she began a career in the horse gaming industry, which she successfully turned into a career focused on creating her own horse video games and helping others improve their horse games.

A key part of this work began in 2018, when she launched The Mane Quest and began publishing reviews of horse games.

She wrote with the critical eye of someone who cared deeply. She could be ruthless, in her estimation the original Windstorm game from 2017: “In summary, Windstorm is just the latest in a long line horse sports competitions where the driving itself feels difficult and uncomfortable, even though it is supposedly the core of the game.”

Gathering frustration, she published a list in 2021: 8 common horse mistakes I want game developers to stop making.

“Of course, game development is always complicated,” she told me recently during a video call in her native Switzerland. “Even as a game developer, you can’t always tell from the outside what’s easy or hard to implement.”

The eight common mistakes that plagued her in horse games ranged from intricate to disorienting.

She lamented that animations in horse games kept displaying incorrectly. They showed the horse’s front legs bending in the wrong direction and prevented players from allowing their horses to trot. In a 2022 interview with Polygon, she admitted that the animation issues were hard due to the intricate way the horses move their legs.

Other issues, such as the games’ tendency to constantly keep saddles on virtual horses, seemed to be repeated mistakes of ignorance.

She loved moments from the 2020 PlayStation hit Ghost of Tsushima when the main character samurai Jin Sakai he takes a nap next to the sleeping horse. “It’s really cute,” she said. But what irritated her was that the horse was shown sleeping in the saddle. “Nobody does that,” she said. “It breaks the saddle. NO! Hide that shit!”

The problem still persisted. Recently she was playing a up-to-date cozy game where the horses wear saddles all the time, even when they are resting near the farm. “Why would you do that?” she remembers thinking. “That’s not how you take horses out to pasture.”

“These horse-related inaccuracies affected her greatly,” she said, “because I like to see horses being horses and behaving… how do I put it? — I also want the horses to feel comfortable.

Yes, even the virtual ones. “It breaks my suspension of disbelief,” she said when details about the horse are wrong.

Worse still, Ruppert believes that many developers may have good intentions but simply don’t know better. “The source of this frustration is that it is so easy to fix and it wouldn’t cost more.”

When Ruppert was blogging about horse games, she heard from people involved in the genre who turned to her for knowledge and advice. Aesir Interactive, the studio behind the former Gale game she slammed, he ended up hiring her.

When Ruppert published The legend of Chiimori clip in September, the enthusiastic response confirmed her faith in horse games and, perhaps more importantly, signaled that the risks she and Aesir took with the game might pay off.

The legend of Chiimori is meant to be different from your typical horse video game. It’s designed as a period piece, an expensively rendered horse adventure that feels as evocative of a specific time and place as Assassin’s Creed or GTA. This is a completely different take on the “fix your family” formula found in many horse games.

“I was one of two or three people who called: You know what? For the next horse game we’re making, we’re going to Asia, to Mongolia, and we’re going to play as a courier,” she said, noting that it took some internal convincing.

“This decision was made in the spring of 2023, and with it came the argument: ‘Hey, more people will like this.’ This will appeal to people who wouldn’t play Riding Simulator 2025 but would choose a historical game with little violence because it’s fun and pretty.’”

She called the explosive reaction to the game “vindicating.” (Ruppert was the game’s artistic producer, but now works on it and other projects as an independent consultant.)

What’s more, she confirmed it The legend of Chiimori avoids mistakes in the game of eight horses.

The game is scheduled for an early access release next year on PC, with a release on any console to be determined.

A good time for horse fun

Ruppert said there have been fallow periods for horse games, particularly in the 2010s, but she’s now seeing the genre flourish.

“Since I started looking at this market, there have certainly been a lot of positive changes,” she said. There are more horse games. Even better: “There’s such a thing as indie horse games these days.” (Earlier this year on Engadget included several independent horse filmsincluding a management simulation game Astridecozy, early access Rivershine Ranchand full of choice Unbridled.)

Ruppert also sees signs of note-taking by some of the biggest studios. She was delighted when the creator of the game Rockstar autopsy of horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 The Mane Quest was quoted.

Things are going so well in horse games that there’s even a different kind of competition: a up-to-date horse game blog to compete with Ruppert’s. In September, a website called Bridle paths began with reviews and essays on depictions of horses on television, films, and video games. The goal, as its author claims, is “to create increasingly better products for the benefit of all horse lovers.”

I discovered the Ruppert virus The legend of Chiimori tweet after I started looking for horse games for my kids to play. My seven-year-old son is especially fond of treats The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as a game about horses. He doesn’t clear dungeons or build devices. Instead, he starts the game, dresses our hero Link in his most secret gear, sneaks through the fields, jumps on his horse, tames it, brings it back to the stable, gives it a name and replaces it with another one, and then repeats the action loop. The day I interviewed Ruppert, he was home unwell and sat on my lap for most of the interview. I asked Ruppert what he thought about horses Tears. She played her predecessor, Breath of the Wildand mostly received praise.

“I think they have super pretty models and very striking styling,” she said.

“I also like that they are quite chunky. They’re kind of like workhorses with a little bit of bulk to them. Players can feel that mass when they ride horses, she said. It is “very tangible in the way they cope. You really feel like you’re sitting on a large animal and not just spinning around on its axis or something.

And she likes that even a tamed horse sometimes disobeys Link’s commands and doesn’t go where he wants. “The horse has a mind of its own,” she said. “It’s a living thing, not just a motorcycle. It was really cool.” As for Zelda’s horse criticism, she had no major reservations. Only wailing. AND Zelda art book 2018 (page 160 to be precise) showed some sketches “pointless things I want horses to do,” including eating tree branches and sticking their heads out of open windows to check on Link. “I would love it all,” Ruppert said.