A horse game went viral, and a horse game expert feels vindicated
Alice Ruppert, who helped conceive Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, has long advocated for improvements in virtual horses.
Alice Ruppert used to tell a self-deprecating joke when friends and peers discovered how much she thought about the depictions of horses in video games.
“People were like, ‘Oh my god, I thought I was the only one who cares about horses in games.’
“No you're not,” she replied. “There are dozens of us.”
Ruppert has never been quite serious about that calculation. For years, she’s been making horse-related games for happy players. And, through a blog she runs about virtual horses, The Mane Quest, she has gathered a community that has identified hundreds of horse games developed over the past five decades.
She certainly knows that the makers of the online horse game Star Stable boast more than 600,000 monthly players.
It had nevertheless been a good line, fueled by frustration of the neglect she long perceived that many game studios were showing to the virtual horses they designed.
It’s just not a line she can use as readily any more—not since September, when she posted a 14-second clip that turned the newest horse game she’s involved in, Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, into one of the most must-watch games slated for 2025.
“We're making a game where you play a courier rider in 13th century Mongolia,” she wrote on Twitter/X two months ago.
“No combat, just you, the horse(s) you've 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, Ruppert told me, a “very, very relevant number of wishlists” on Steam.
Dozens of us, indeed.
Constructive criticism
Ruppert has loved horses all her life. She rode them as a kid, grew up playing horse video games (along with Tomb Raider and The Sims) and in 2015 began a game development career that she successfully steered into one focused on making horse video games of her own and helping others make their horse games better.
A key part of that work commenced in 2018, when she launched The Mane Quest and began publishing critiques of horse games.
She wrote with the critical eye of someone who cares a lot. She could be unsparing, as in her assessment of the original 2017 Windstorm game: “All in all, Windstorm is only the last in a long line of horse games where the riding itself feels stilted and awkward despite supposedly being the core of the game.”
Gathering her frustrations, in 2021 she published a list: 8 Common Horse Mistakes I Want Game Developers to Stop Making.
“Obviously game dev is complicated, always,” she told me recently, during a video call from her native Switzerland. “Even as a game developer, you can't always tell what is easy or hard to implement from the outside.”
Those eight common mistakes that bugged her about horse games had ranged from the complex to the confounding.
Games with horses kept getting the animations wrong, she lamented. They showed horses’ forelegs bending the wrong way, and they blocked players from letting their horses trot. The animation issues were tough, she acknowledged in a 2022 interview with Polygon, because of the complex ways horses move their legs.
Other problems, such as the propensity for games to keep saddles on their virtual horses at all times, seemed like repeated errors made from ignorance.
She loved the moments in the 2020 PlayStation blockbuster Ghost of Tsushima when the protagonist samurai Jin Sakai dozes next to his slumbering horse. “That’s really cute,” she said. But it irked her that the horse was shown sleeping in its saddle. “Nobody does that,” she said. “It breaks the saddle. No! Hide that shit!”
The issue persisted. She was recently playing a new cozy game in which the horses wear saddles at all times, even while relaxing near their farm. “Why would you do this?” she remembers thinking. “That’s not how anyone puts their horses in a pasture.”
These horse inaccuracies would get to her, she said, “because I like seeing horses being horses and being like—how do I put this?—I also want horses to be comfortable.”
Yes, even the virtual ones. “It breaks my suspension of disbelief,” when the horse details are wrong, she said.
Worse, Ruppert believes a lot of developers may be well-intentioned but simply don’t know better. “Where some of that frustration comes from, is that it's so easy to fix, and it would not have cost you more.”
As she blogged about horse games, Ruppert heard from people working in the genre, who tapped her for expertise and advice. Aesir Interactive, the studio behind that first Windstorm game that she slammed, eventually hired her.
Taking a chance
When Ruppert posted the Legend of Khiimori clip in September, the enthusiastic response affirmed her faith in horse games and, perhaps more crucially, signaled that the risk that she and Aesir had taken with the game might pay off.
The Legend of Khiimori is meant to feel different from the typical horse video game. It is being designed as a period piece, an expensively rendered horse adventure that is as evocative of a specific time and place as an Assassin’s Creed or GTA. That’s a far cry from the fix-your-family-farm framing of many a horse game.
“I was one of two or three people who made the call of: You know what? For this 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 it took a little bit of convincing internally.
“That decision was made sometime in spring 2023, and with it came the argument of, 'Hey, this will appeal to more people. This will appeal to people who would not play, like, Riding Simulator 2025, but who would pick up a historical game with low violence, because it's fun and pretty.'”
She called the explosive reaction to the game “vindicating.” (Ruppert had been a creative producer on the game but now works as a freelance consultant on it and other projects.)
Also, for the record, she confirmed that Legend of Khiimori avoids her eight horse game mistakes.
The game is slated for an early access release next year on PC, with any console release TBD.
A good time for horse games
There have been fallow times for horse games, especially in the 2010s, Ruppert said, but she’s now seeing the genre flourish.
“There has definitely been a lot of positive development in the time since I started looking into this market,” she said. There are more horse games. Even better: “There is such a thing as indie horse games nowadays.” (Earlier this year, Engadget covered a bunch of horse indies, including the simulation management game Astride, the cozy, early access Ranch of Rivershine, and the choice-filled Unbridled.)
Ruppert is also seeing signs that some of the biggest studios are taking notes. She was thrilled when a Rockstar game developer’s post-mortem about horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 cited The Mane Quest.
Things are going so well with horse games that there’s even some competition of a different sort: a new horse gaming blog to rival Ruppert’s. In September, a site called The Bridle Paths launched with reviews and essays about the depictions of horses in TV, movies and video games. The aim, its author states, is “to create better and better products to the benefit of all horse fans.”
A Zelda post-script
I discovered Ruppert’s viral Legend of Khiimori tweet after I began searching for horse games for my kids to play. My seven-year-old son, in particular, treats The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as a horse game. He doesn’t clear dungeons nor build contraptions. Instead, he boots the game up, dresses our hero Link in his stealthiest gear, sneaks through the fields, leaps onto a horse, tames it, brings it back to a stable, names it and swaps it out for another one, before repeating the loop.
My son was home sick the day I interviewed Ruppert and sat on my lap during much of the chat. I asked Ruppert what her take was on the horses in Tears. She’s played its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, and mostly had praise.
“I think they have super pretty models, with very efficient stylization,” she said.
“I also love that they're kind of chunky. They're sort of like this draft-type horse, where they have a bit of mass to them.” Players can feel that mass when they ride the horses, she said. It’s “very tangible in how they handle. You really feel like you're on a big animal and not just spinning on its axis or something.”
And she likes that even a tamed horse will sometimes disobey Link’s commands and not walk where he wants him to. “The horse has a mind of its own,” she said. “It's a living thing, not just a motorcycle. That was really cool.”
As for a critique of Zelda’s horses, she didn’t have major gripes. Just a lament. A 2018 Zelda art book (page 160, to be exact) had shown some sketches of “pointless stuff I want the horses to do,” including eating tree branches and popping their heads through open windows to check in on Link. “I would have loved all this,” Ruppert said.
Item 2: In brief…
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Kadokawa confirmed yesterday that it had received a letter of interest from Sony but had not decided on any acquisition, The Verge reports.
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Gaming remains a small part of Nvidia’s currently AI-supercharged business, with overall revenue for the quarter totaling $35.1 billion.
☁️ Microsoft is beginning to let owners of select Xbox games play them via streaming connections over the cloud (on phones, tablets, etc), as long as they are Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.
Previously, Microsoft only let Game Pass subscribers stream games that are part of the services’ all-you-can-play library.
☁️ Sony is letting PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers stream select games from that service’s library via its PlayStation Portal handheld.
The Portal had previously only been able to stream games transmitted from a user’s PlayStation 5.
Read Game File’s exclusive February 2024 interview with Sony’s Hiromi Wakai about the making of the PlayStation Portal.
🤔 An update on billionaires who play video games: one recently stood outside a French supermarket, ready to fist-fight a Call of Duty player (via Dexerto). Another may now be the world’s top Diablo IV players (via Forbes).
Fascinating about the horse games. Also, hadn't seen anything about that PS Portal update, but that's pretty awesome!