Bibi & Tina at the horse farm — An Exercise in Mediocrity

Bibi & Tina is a popular German kids’ franchise of audio dramas, a spin-off of the Bibi Blocksberg series. While the main series’ appeal is Bibi’s life as a teenage witch, the spin-off focuses less on her magic and more on her horse-related adventures. 

There have been several earlier video game adaptations, although as with most horse game series, it’s hard to find an exact list of titles and releases. 

In Fall 2018, developer Independent Arts Software released Bibi & Tina: Adventures with Horses at the same time as their other joint project, My Riding Stables: Your Horse Breeding. Both games were published on Steam under the familyplay label via Rokapublish, but the financier of the project and console version distributor is the German publishing house Markt + Technik.

The newest game, made once again by Independent Arts Software and MuT, with Kiddinx as the license giver for the Bibi & Tina brand and characters, was released on October 10th 2019. 

This new title is being published on the German market as Bibi und Tina auf dem Martinshof, referencing a commonly used setting of the series, while the English title is the ultra generic (and not even capitalized) Bibi & Tina at the horse farm. 

The game was not on my radar at all, and after the less than stellar experience with My Riding Stables, I would likely not have bothered with the game if the publisher hadn’t sent me a review code. Fortunately, Bibi & Tina auf dem Martinshof ended up frustrating me a lot less than My Riding Stables did. Is that enough to make it a decent horse game however or is the bar just incredibly low? Find out in the TMQ review. 

Story & Setting

If you are not already familiar with Bibi, Tina and other characters around the Martin family farm, this game will make sure it stays that way. You can select which of the two titular characters to play as, but neither they nor any additional characters are introduced in any way.

Even though the game should have plenty of existing lore to build on, it does absolutely nothing with it beyond name-dropping a handful of names and locations via its explanatory text boxes.

Pretty sure it should be play as, not with.

Any and all story and exposition is presented through these text boxes, with no cutscenes or animation.

The game contains three play modes: Missions, which is the game’s “story mode” for lack of a better term, Best Time Challenge, in which you replay story missions for a new personal high score and Riding Out, where you can access the whole map in order to collect little gifts that eventually unlock new horses for you.

The eighteen total missions consist of four or five different mechanics that mostly boil down to riding somewhere within a timeframe, though a little bit of variety is added by either making you follow a trail without leaving it, making you ride from checkpoint to checkpoint or making you follow a rooster that leads the way. All of these individual mechanics are alright, but none of them are particularly interesting.

The story setup is that some animals have escaped from the farm, and you ride to different places in order to get them back. There is no direct dialogue of any kind, the only storytelling you get is via an abstract narrator’s text box at the start of the mission and without any further text at the mission’s end. You get no cutscene of the animals escaping, no real sense of progress how many you’ve already found, and no outro cutscene or text before the credits roll after the last mission. 

Some missions even have an NPC or animal model that is briefly visible at your final checkpoint, but these models don’t remain visible once your mission is over, making the world feel incredibly lifeless. All of this works and is not horrible, but endlessly minimalistic. I am reminded of old Atari games that had epic looking cover illustrations while all you got ingame where some differently colored pixels and the rest was left to the player’s imagination. 

Note the NPC in the background: he is part of the mission setup, but not visible in the world right after.

The goal in this mission is to follow the flower trail.

Controls

Horribly clunky horse riding controls have become such a firmly established genre tradition that Bibi & Tina stands out positively by virtue of the controls feeling “alright”. Your main goal in the riding missions is to find your next checkpoint and head towards it without colliding with anything. Any challenge beyond that is limited to endurance management: Your horse can gallop as long as its endurance meter is not empty. If you mash X too hard, the horse drastically slows down. 

The resulting gameplay is functional, but not remotely challenging or interesting for adult players.

Jumping works by riding straight at an obstacle at a canter or gallop, and is fun enough that I would have liked another mission or two to actually take place on a jumping course, or at least to incorporate obstacles into the track.

Jumping missions are structured with these pink checkpoints just like almost all riding missions.

Note the endurance meter in the bottom right: I pushed my horse too hard, so it stopped.

Horse Care 

Horse caring minigames such as hoof picking and grooming are absolute staples of the genre, and yet very few games manage to implement them in ways that are not frustrating. Unfortunately, Bibi & Tina is not really an exception. 

Picking the stones out of hooves by clicking on them is alright, but that is followed by what feels like a minute of tedious “brushing” over the hoof in which the only tangible progress is that the dirt texture loses a bit of opacity. The mechanic is exactly the same as in last year’s My Riding Stables, and no less tedious. The same boring “slowly erase the dirt texture” logic is applied to the grooming and hosing minigames. It is dull and unsatisfying, and remains a cheap way to artificially increase playtime. 

I think hoofpicking takes a little bit less time here than in My Riding Stables, so that’s something.

Hosing one of these dirt spots takes 12 seconds.

There is one aspect of the grooming implementation that I genuinely like about Bibi & Tina though, and that is that these horse care minigames are entirely optional: you can access them via the titular Martin’s farm by entering the stable. As a reward, you get an endurance boost, i.e. a refill of your endurance meter the next time you press R1. Unfortunately, even that mild appreciation of decent game design is thwarted by the fact that the endurance boosts don’t stack, which means that if you’ve just picked your horse’s hooves, grooming it further is useless until you’ve been out on a mission again and used your one boost. 

Strangely, I was only able to choose between the six grooming games while in Riding Out mode, whereas the Missions mode would only let me access the hosing minigame, but not the other five. This seems buggy to me, because I cannot imagine a concrete reason why only one of the care mechanics would be accessible throughout the story.

Inside the Martins’ stable

You can choose the grooming minigames from this menu after entering the stable

Okay look I criticize a lot about these games but I am 100% behind the decision to let players put a tiny top hat on their horse in the “dress up” minigame.

The feeding minigame is cute: you have to quickly decide which objects to feed to your horse and which not.

Open Worlds and Fragmentation

In Missions mode, your next mission is marked on the map, but there is nothing else to discover in the game. In Riding Out, you can find “hidden objects”, i.e. gifts, that are scattered around the game world. Collecting these objects eventually unlocks more horses for the Riding Out mode. 

You can replay story missions for the timing challenge, but instead of accessing them again where you originally found them in the world, you have to exit the game and start the missions from the menu. 

Why the game insists on fragmenting these modes rather than having one world with multiple objectives in it is an absolute mystery to me, and it mirrors similar situations in Ostwind (2017) and My Riding Stables (2018). All of these games have an openly traversable world, but offer it as a completely separate feature from the rest of the gameplay, even though said gameplay might take place in the same world. 

It’s an utterly bizarre choice that would be practically unimaginable in any open world game outside this genre, and I have no explanation from why publishers keep insisting on it: if you have an open world, missions that take place in that world, and collectibles distributed across that world, why would you artificially separate these mechanics and have the player access them via a menu? The whole point of good open world design is to give the player a choice in which task to tackle next, where to explore, what to discover. That entire point is nullified by separating the mechanics in the way that Bibi & Tina, Ostwind and My Riding Stables do. 

Many of the issues  in these types of games can be explained by there simply being not enough budget and not enough dev time, due to the publishers’ conviction that the audience for horse games is too small to invest more. This fragmentation of open world mechanics into three different game modes, when the game would only profit from having the different mechanics accessible from world map however… I literally cannot think of any financial or promotional benefit for this apart from the notion that whoever comes up with these concepts is too far out of touch with the principles of modern game design to even consider alternatives.

I severely doubt that combining the three modes into one world would have increased the devs’ workload if it had been planned from the beginning.

Instead of telling you how many more “objects” to find for your next horse, you simply get this “7/96” counter at the bottom left.

Visuals and Audio

The 2D and 3D assets that are there are cute: the interface is consistent and polished enough to make a positive impression. The world is created in a relatively simple cartoon style, although the decision to add black outlines to characters and horses but not to trees and buildings is a bit off. Bibi & Tina at least doesn’t suffer from low budget pseudo-realism as many horse games do, and what can be seen of the horse animation is alright. 

Unfortunately, you see very little of said animation, due to the fact that the camera sticks very close to your character unless you’re going at a gallop, and it cannot be rotated, which means you never see your horse from the side unless it’s standing still in the stable. 

Since Tina (or Bibi, if Tina is the one you’re playing as) is constantly riding beside you, the awful placing of the character in the saddle becomes visible, and the rising trot is so off-rhythm that it is actively distracting to me.  

In a rising trot, a rider should move up and down with the movement of their horse instead of randomly bouncing around on top of it

I’m pretty sure you’re sitting on the pommel, Tina. That cannot be comfortable.

The visual quality of the world varies, with farms and buildings looking alright, but other areas appearing cheap and empty, with very repetitive-looking textures and blandly sculpted terrain. 

Despite the simplified art style and lack of model variety, I experienced occasional frame drops and very obvious level-of-detail pop ins in the tree textures during my PS4 playthrough. 

The music is unobtrusive and serves its purpose, but some of the horse sound effects have a tendency to awkwardly repeat and overlap, which sounds buggy. This can be noticed even in the game’s trailer on the PlayStation Store, a promotional video cut together so half-assedly that I have a hard time believing that whoever made it had any interest whatsoever in actually selling the game.

Note the trees’ textures popping in as they get closer.

The “quarry” area is quite ugly throughout.

The map can help you find your next objective, but since hidden objects are only visible in Riding Out, there is no incentive to explore between missions.

Scope

Playing through all 18 of the missions took me a bit over an hour. Together with the Riding Out mode and trying the grooming minigames, the game kept me busy for roughly 90 minutes. I did not invest the time to collect all the hidden objects however. 

I normally very much don’t like judging games’ value by hours of playtime per dollar: I think that tends to be a very shallow approach that values quantity over quality. But where many short indie games appeal in their creativity and their uniqueness, Bibi & Tina cannot claim to be particularly creative or unique. I don’t think adding another 18 riding missions would really make this a better game if nothing else about it were improved, but I do think that the shortness may be relevant to any parents who consider spending 20$ to entertain their horse-loving children. 

The quality over quantity approach to game value only really works if there is significant quality to begin with. Bibi & Tina falls short in that regard.

Conclusion

All in all, Bibi & Tina at the horse farm is definitely not among the worst horse games I’ve played. The game gets around many of the most infuriating characteristics that horse games tend to have, but unfortunately does not replace these sources of frustration with anything better. The result is not so much a good horse game as it is one that is not quite as offensive as others: I suppose you can’t get criticized for bad horse animations if you simply don’t let anyone see your horse animations. 

For young children, Bibi & Tina at the horse farm may offer an hour or two of decent entertainment, as long as they’re ready to make up for the lack of storytelling with their imagination. For adult horse game fans, the game will hold little to no appeal. 

Bibi & Tina at the horse farm / Bibi & Tina auf dem Martinshof was released on Switch and PS4 on Oct 10th 2019. The Mane Quest was provided with a review copy for free.