2024: the year of the horse girl?
I’m in the mood for a fun little post, so I will say: I’m starting to think 2024 is an amazing year for the horse girls.
Maybe I’m biased. I’m a horse girl coming out of hiding this year because life is too short not to enjoy things and slowly gravitating away from “everything in my childhood or early teen years is cringe” to “actually, many of these things are iconic bangers and I enjoy it unironically”.
When I was a child, I had several books about horses, I started helping out in stables, and I played horse with other children jumping over stuff and galloping. I grew up playing horse games on the shared family PC and later, my own PC. Star Stable, Howrse, a horse racing game, several ones I don’t remember the name of, the horse adventure games by lexis numerique/Ubisoft… I even created a fan group about these games on a social media site that existed here pre-Facebook. But of course, teen boys had to join it ironically, spamming it with bullshit and making fun of it. It wasn’t even people I knew, total strangers. Girl interests are stupid after all. I ended up just deleting it. It was time to grow up and enjoy what normal and respectable people liked, which is of course what teen boys like. So my next love was Assassin’s Creed.
But this year I’ve been craving horse games again. It’s a shame most of them are old, outdated, with no new features and aimed at tweens. I think I started craving it because my fianceé played a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2 and their horse behavior and animations are the best on the market, a horse girl dream, if you will. You can tell there were horse girls on the dev team.
Earlier this year I watched the video “Why Do Horse Girls?” by Tara Mooknee and it was so fun and so true. It seems like there’s a rising trend of unapologetically being a horse girl again, especially because I saw some more videos like that pop up. Horses are cool, it’s badass to be able to be friends with a 600kg giant.
And the games can be sooo serious, my child self would metaphorically pee her pants at some of the plot points. You had to sneak around in stealth missions, save horses from a burning stable, horses got stolen, there were love triangles, people got poisoned and championships were sabotaged, man. In some, you were followed by a mysterious dark rider and you had to flee before they caught you, and there were timed missions stressing me the hell out. Sometimes you were even the horse trying to find your owner who was about to fall off a cliff like Mufasa.
It was serious business. The stakes were always extremely high and are you surprised? Look at horse movies, they’re almost always about some dangerous horse that hates everyone and will get sold or put down but then a miracle happens because that one girl can change it and they’re winning the most prestigious championship in the area.
Anyway, all of this made me check out horse games on Steam. The results were a bit disappointing. Not much, and either bad reviews, unreleased or Early Access.
Then I came across the blog The Mane Quest which is about critiquing horse games and serving as a resource for people and companies who wanna make good horse games. Finally, another adult advocating for good horse games that appeal to adults and try to learn from the mistakes of the past! 2023 and 2024 have seen more development of horse games by indie companies.
It’s been amazing that others have seen this shift as well and have been writing about it: Chayenne MacDonald at Engadget has written about it too.
I’m soooo excited for what the rising efforts and interest in horse games will produce!!
Published 17 Oct, 2024, edited 7Â months, 2Â weeks ago