The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴

@themanequest

The Mane Quest is a website dedicated to "horse games" and the portrayal of horses in video games. Always happy to learn about and give feedback to upcoming games with horses! 💖 themanequest.com created by Alice Ruppert malicedafirenze.bsky.social

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The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jul 6

The HORSE CLUB Ride West AMA is now live on reddit! Make sure to head over there and ask your questions! www.reddit.com/r/GamesWithH...

screenshot from HORSE CLUB: RIDE WEST showing three girls riding alongside each other on horses, in a Canyon environment. A dog is running alongside them

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jun 24

Have you checked out the new Horse Club game yet? 👀 Considering the previous games, I expect this to be a really solid, kid-friendly, story-based horse adventure, and I'm excited about some of the changes made since Horse Club Adventures 2! More info: www.themanequest.com/blog/2026/6/...

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 2

the scooby do unmasking meme, with the masked culprit labeled "literally any sort of shoddy looking video game horse" and the unmasked version labeled "malbers horse animset pro"

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 2

In more pleasant news: I got my new phone case, and you can get one of these too if you like 🥰🥰

Photo of an iphone 15 lying on a white surface screen-down. The case is black with white TMQ logos on it (a game controller that looks like a horse head)

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Apr 8

NEW VIDEO! I had a wildly fun day yesterday and I need to tell you all about it: PikPok and Dead Good PR invited me to London for a Hobby Horsing Competition to celebrate the console release of Rival Stars Horse Racing

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Feb 9

There was an exchange in their Facebook comments where they denied that the key art was AI-generated and said it was "made on PC" and "made with a 3D editing tool", which... uuh... I'll let you be the judge but I've never heard any digital artists talk about their work quite like that.

key art for "Open Saddle". It shows two horse heads, a bay and a grey, in front of a background of fields and trees. A rounded board with western style lettering shows the game's title at the bottom. The image looks AI-generated to me, one of the more obvious tells is the way the rein attaches to the bit on the horse on the right.

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Feb 9

The developers of Open Saddle decided to remove my comment asking them for clarification on which assets they used. I'll grant that I wasn't exactly being super nice, but I don't have a lot of patience for devs that use genAI and are deliberately misleading players www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq_z...

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Feb 1

I'm doing a poll on what to review next, though as always no guarantees that I won't just do what I feel like after all 😇 Since Bsky has no poll functionality, please just comment your preference in replies!

screenshot from a discord poll: Which game would you like TMQ to play/review?

Options:

Revisiting RDR2 (finish story, analyse horses)
Red Dead Online equestrian communities
Ecos: La Brea
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Vintage Story & Horse Mods

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 19

it's really exactly that bad 🥲

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 19

like come the fuck on

Even so, please note that this article is in no way a review of the whole game. If you’re not interested in detailed analysis of horse animation, then you’ve come to the wrong website. But this is The Mane Quest and complaining extensively about how horse legs work or don’t work is what we do. Let’s begin.

(gif of goat moving in slow motion) Less fetlock motion could be part of the goat-inspiration, but nothing excuses those overly bendy knees.

text: We can try to explain this away by pretending that Torrent is more goat than horse, or at least a mixture of the two: from looking at goat walk footage, their lower legs stay fairly straight indeed. Since Torrent’s legs look significantly more equine than uuh… caprine, I’m not really satisfied by that excuse. Especially since there are actually other non-goat horses in this game as enemy mounts and they have tend to have the same issue.

While I initially found this unbelievably infuriating, playing the game for longer has made me realize that the choice is at least partially understandable from a gameplay perspective – in a game like Elden Ring, where precision and timing is crucial against every foe, your mount’s movement being uneven might be enough to stop you from using it during combat.

Meaning: I get why smooth movement was prioritized over equine realism. At the same time though, I don’t think it would have been impossible to get both: It should be possible for Torrent’s legs to straighten when he’s standing still and for his pastern bones to align properly, without that severely hindering the mount’s usefulness for the player.

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 5

2026 will be the Year of the Horse! Here's a bunch of cool horse game things to look forward to! 🥰 Video here if you prefer that: www.tiktok.com/@themaneques...

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 3

Have you heard? 2025 was the best year ever on The Mane Quest in terms of site traffic and visitors! And the Year of the Horse is only starting 💪 More here: www.themanequest.com/blog/2025/12...

screenshot from the site traffic insights of The Mane Quest, showing total yearly traffic from 2018 to 2025 as a black on white graph. The curve rises steeply from 2018 to 2020, then drops a bit until 2023, where it rises again. The 2025 point is higher than 2020, i.e. the highest ever, at a bit under 300k visits.

At the top of the screenshot, you can also see a total of 1.3M visits, a Bounce Rate of 77.89%, 1.1M Unique visitors and 2M pageviews

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Nov 22

Horse Racing Manager on Steam is enjoying 90% positive reviews and has recently dropped their price a bit to make Early Access more accessible. 😊 If you missed it: www.themanequest.com/blog/2025/10...

screenshot of the Steam store capsule for horse racing manager, cursor is hovering over the 51 Very Positive reviews to show that 90% are positive. Full text on: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2740170/Horse_Racing_Manager/

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Aug 12

made a follow up video with some more insight 😁

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Aug 12

Made a video about Equinox: Homecoming yesterday and it's doing splendidly on tiktok and insta reels 💪💪

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jun 3

The TMQ Community once again asking the important questions

screenshot of a discord poll saying "Pebbles or Roach". 4 people voted Pebbles, 2 people voted Roach, 20 people voted Yes.

(Pebbles is the horse from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Roach is the horse from The Witcher)

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 28

The Ranch of Rivershine has spent some time on Steam's New & Trending list, Recent Reviews remain Very Positive, and its full release clearly outperformed the Early Access release two years ago in terms of player numbers. We love to see it, congrats Éloise! 💖 www.themanequest.com/blog/2025/5/...

Screenshot from the SteamDB Page of The Ranch of Rivershine, showing the total player graph over maximum time with a clear peak at the end for Release with over twice as many players as around the initial Early Access release

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 27

my clients haven't given me enough to do today so I've spent the morning so far making a salty bingo card about just how naively a lot of people tackle the concept of making their own horse game

"I'm making my own horse game!" Bingo card
The bingo squares are:
Like RDR2 but just horses
Dev process starts with making horse models
Open World
has not made a game before
what even is a core loop
"what else would you like to see in a horse game"
Like SSO but better
multiplayer
"not like other horse games" but fails to articulate actual USPs
multiple breeds
has 50 saddle pad colors, doesn't have gameplay
environment: idk generic hills and forests
REALISTIC (middle square)
working title includes "horse" and "game"
showjumping! (dressage planned!)
"oh yeah I've also been disappointed by other horse games promising too much and not delivering"
(arrow pointing to previous square) zero reflection on why that might have been the case
devlogs consists of endless reworks of the existing horse model
avoids the "you've inherited a farm" cliche by just wordlessly giving you a farm anyway
has community discord, does not have playable prototype
"might add Western riding later!"
first horse is a generic warmblood breed
setting: vaguely modern, vaguely European
story coming soon!
disappears from the face of the earth after realizing that finishing games is actually hard

text below the bingo squares: **seriously I love y'all's passion but you need to start by making and finishing tiny projects. Your first game should be finished in a day and I'm not joking. Take literally any "my first game" tutorial and just add horses. Finish 10 tiny games before you even consider something bigger.

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 25

Funnily enough this game has horse armor DLC as part of its "Supporter Pack" (a callback/parody of the Oblivion horse armor) and I could swear this is a different horse model underneath that armor? Or does the muzzle just look infinitely better if it doesn't have that weirdly low noseband over it?

Screenshot from the Supporters' Pack of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, showing a horse covered in medieval fantasy armor. It stands on a patch of grass next to a road.

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 25

ugh, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon uses a seemingly unaltered horse animset pro model for its mount :') I'm not mad that developers use pre-made assets, I just wish the assets they had to chose from weren't all ass 😭

Screenshot from Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, showing the ingame horse. It's the Horse Animset Pro asset

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· May 9

Equinox: Homecoming, a horse riding mystery MMO, launched into Early Access yesterday to Very Positive reviews on Steam 🎉🎉🎉

screenshot of the steam capsule art & description for Equinox: Homecoming, showing that the game has 84% positive reviews at 83 total reviews, released yesterday by Blue Scarab Entertainment

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Mar 28

that list is current titles only, if you're specifically looking for the nostalgia stuff, my personal fave is Mein Pferdehof/My Horse Farm 💖💖

screenshot from the 2003 game Mein Pferdehof, showing a cartoony horse in its stall

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Mar 2

Have a bit of gameplay footage from My Life: Riding Stables 3, and check out my review if you haven't already: www.themanequest.com/blog/2025/3/...

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 28

Teaser: I'm playing the 2022 My Life: Riding Stables 3 for my next review 🥰 Because I was curious about it and because seemingly nobody in the community has tried this one (it has 11 reviews on Steam)

Screenshot from My Life: Riding Stables 3. Horse and rider stand facing each other, there's an open barn and hay feeder in the background. The horse is tacked up and wears a traffic cone as a hat.

Screenshot from My Life: Riding Stables 3. Horse and rider stand facing the distance, where there are evergreen trees and castle ruins. The visuals are stylized and cartoony.

Screenshot from My Life: Riding Stables 3. Horse customization screen where the player can select coat pattern, facial markings and leg markings for their horse.

Screenshot from My Life: Riding Stables 3. Horse and rider (mounted) stand facing a path through a green field, there's a fences pasture on one side and some hills and birch trees on the other. The visuals are stylized and brightly colored.

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Jan 23

it's lovely to see increasing activity and discussion on the /r/GamesWithHorses subreddit 🥰

screenshot of /r/gameswithhorses on reddit, showing three posts asking for specific horse game recommendations

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Dec 27

I am sad to report that bsky doesn't quite hold up in horse game news reach yet 😔 (so you should tell all your friends to follow this account and repost my posts probably? 😇)

Screenshot of a bluesky post about the Unbridled release date announcement, it has 3 reposts and 10 likes

Screenshot of a twitter post about the Unbridled release date announcement, it has 7 reposts and 58 likes

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Dec 8

idk how high the interest in it is now that the game's been out for half a year already, but I'll have y'all know that I finished my playthrough of My Horse: Bonded Spirits today and will be working on drafting the review article next 😇

screenshot from My Horse: Bonded Spirits: a rider on a horse trotting along the edge of a village. The mood is grey, the level of detail is low.

Screenshot from My Horse: Bonded Spirits. Horse & rider trotting along a dirt path, there are trees in the background and tufts of grass in the foreground. The mood is sunny and bright

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Dec 3

I made a horse game title bingo card, please enjoy

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Nov 27

I love that you're doing this, check out my website themanequest.com for LOTS of thoughts on what makes and breaks horses in games!! 💖

The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴@themanequest· Nov 27

The Mane Quest is on Bluesky now! 😱 Get your fresh horse game news, reviews, developer interviews and genre analyses right here ✨ www.themanequest.com