Review: Petz Horsez 2 – A Content-Rich Adventure Game plagued by Questionable Horses and Awkward Controls

When selecting games to review on TMQ, I generally try to choose newer titles. I want to provide context and information for people trying to make a purchasing decision, so it’s relevant to me that games are easily available today and not just memories of the past.

The review you’re about to read is a bit of an exception to said guideline. But Petz Horsez 2 is available on Steam these days and a relevant reference for many adult horse game fans. We’re looking at a game that I hadn’t played until now, but which is to many people what Mein Pferdehof is to me: that one sacred childhood memory of a horse game that was good. 

Petz Horsez 2 was originally released in 2007. It was developed by French studio Lexis Numérique and published by Ubisoft, who would go on to release the first entry in their massively popular Assassin’s Creed series that same year. 

Like many horse games, Petz Horsez 2 was sold under drastically different titles, so you may also have known this same game as:   

• Pippa Funnell: Secrets of the Ranch

• Abenteuer auf dem Reiterhof 6: Kampf um die Ranch

• Alexandra Ledermann: Le Secret du Haras

All of those are a mouthful, I know. Since the game is being sold on Steam under Petz Horsez 2 nowadays, I’ll stick with that one.

A closer look at this game hasn’t only been requested on multiple occasions by some of TMQ’s regular readers, it’s also been named as an all-time favorite by many. So how does the horsie adventure game hold up without a lens of nostalgia to gaze through? 

Let’s have a thorough look at the good, bad and ugly parts of Petz Horsez 2.

Setting and Characters

You play as Emma, an aspiring veterinarian from the US on the way to her first job in Paris. In the game’s first minutes, Emma’s taxi breaks down and strands her in Béléou, a tiny old village in the French countryside. You are soon introduced to Flora, the manager of a stud farm outside Béléou, her nephew Oliver, and their friends. 

A single night’s visit to help with the birth of a foal quickly turns into an extended stay, as Emma decides to help the stud farm with its myriad of problems. Most notable among these is the disappearance of farm owner Marie and the Mayor’s threats to requisition the land for more profitable projects. 

To help the stud farm and make it your home, you explore Béléou and its surroundings, train the farm’s horses and ride them in competitions and of course try and find out what happened to Marie. 

The game tells its main story in animated, voice acted cutscenes, with additional dialogue appearing as voiced text boxes.

Between Daily Chores and Story Quests

Petz Horsez 2 is as much barn management as it is adventure game. 

The game uses a day-night-cycle that defines what tasks are available to you, with many story missions taking place at a specific place and time, and many daily chores only being available before nightfall. 

When no story mission is available, you go after the daily chores at the farm: horses need to be fed, brushed, their hooves picked, their stalls mucked. Aside from exercising your steeds in dressage, jumping and cross country, you have access to lunge training and a dialogue activity, both of which influence how fast your horse levels its skills. Your horses can get sick, which means you have to select the right treatment and then let them rest before you can ride them again.

The correct treatments for sick horses are usually easy to guess from the options at hand.

This is an FPM game, if you will.

The horse care minigames for hoof picking, coat cleaning and stall mucking are among the “not so bad” category of implementation for this sort of thing. They do feel somewhat tedious, but follow some basic rules of satisfactory gameplay by having dirt clearly go away where you interact. Thankfully, these stable chores don’t have to be done every day, and horses you don’t ride tend not to get dirty.

Apart from the fact that the controls are a bit fidgety, I’d call this hoof picking minigame about as good as it gets.

Coat brushing can get frustrating because after the first layer of dirt is gone, you don’t see well what you’re missing.

There is some flexibility in how quickly you continue with story missions most of the time, and sometimes you are forced to pass a few days before the main quest continues. Thanks to some activities like fast travel, book reading and item shopping taking ridiculous amounts of ingame time however, you can always skip forward easily when you want to reach a specific time or day.

We Have To Talk About The Horses

Many of the 13 year old game’s visual assets have aged with unexpected grace: The character animations are entertaining and always serve their purpose well in terms of communicating emotions. The village of Béléou, with its dozens of nooks and crannies, its medieval looking stone buildings and bridges and its shady squares and alleys exudes old fashioned country charm that evokes a real sense of comfort and coziness. 

Unfortunately however – here we go, you can guess what’s coming – this does not extend to the horses. The look of the titular animals is atrocious: they have edges in all the wrong places, the angles of their bodies are all wrong, their legs look broken more often than not, and all of that is covered in a photo texture that adds muscles and shiny coats on top of the disturbingly crooked body shapes. Interestingly enough, the model for the foals you can breed and take care of looks significantly less horrifying. 

What is that…. chest area even?

Anyone with conformation expertise wanna do a detailed analysis of everything wrong with these?

Oh god please stop no what is that stance even I dont… how?

The foals aren’t nearly as bad I think?

The horses’ animations are (for once) not the main problem. Although legs sometimes bend when they shouldn’t and some movements look a bit stiff, there is a myriad of different animations between the various activities. 

The dialogue training that you access in the pasture behind your stables deserves special mention for its variety in horse expressions that you have to read. That “walking backwards” may not actually be horse body language for “I want you to teach me how to rear” can be forgiven: The dialogue minigame is a fun little addition. 

The atrocious horse shapes is something that one can undoubtedly get used to. I definitely stopped physically wincing at it some time into my playthrough. But when a game supposedly focused on horses does not offer the experience of actually enjoying the presence of my digital equine companion, then something very fundamental is missing for me. 

Controls and User Experience

Lets get right to the other core issue: The game’s controls and user interface are an absolute mess. You mainly use the arrow keys to move around in the world, but UI interactions require the mouse, jumping requires the space key and dressage training makes use of the number keys. 

As a result, your hands are constantly moving between different positions on mouse and keyboard. Basic movement is clunky as hell thanks to not allowing for any backwards walking and sometimes ignoring your input if you press forward and sideways at the same time. 

The stall mucking minigame is controlled from a first person perspective that locks your camera to the mouse, but to end said minigame you have to move the mouse to the top right for a cursor to show up so you can click a button. 

Petz Horsez 2 is a game consisting of a dozen different systems, and all of them have their own rules and controls, the whole thing feeling thrown together at random. Each system, from dressage training to hoof picking to photography is explained to you in a series of lengthy text boxes when you first start it, with no way to look up any rules or controls a second time unless you happen to have the paper manual at hand. 

With its many different systems, Petz Horsez 2 manages to have a measure of depth and complexity that newer horse games like My Riding Stables or Ostwind cannot rival, but it sacrifices a lot of accessibility in the bargain. 

Riding, Training, Lunging, Breeding

Horse riding exists in Petz Horsez 2 in a handful of different contexts: dressage, jumping and cross-country training all have slightly different controls and interface, with the free riding across the map being another separate thing again. 

The controls are similar enough to not be overly confusing, but keeping the four systems completely separate takes depth from all of them. Why can I not jump an obstacle while I am out riding from the Stud Farm to the Village? Why can I modify the speed of my canter using the arrow keys in Jumping, Cross Country and free riding, but in Dressage I have to hold the “collected gait” button for basically the same thing? Why does the free riding across the map only let me walk and canter, with the existence of trot apparently limited to the Lunging and Dressage minigames? 

Both jumping (above) and Cross Country (right) are about regulating your speed and then pressing space at the right time…

…and yet the game uses a slightly different communication style for said speed regulation.

These inconsistencies are perhaps not game-ruining, but they lead to the horse riding feeling completely disjointed. In games with decent horse riding and worlds, I often find myself riding for the joy of it, avoiding fast travel in favor of spending time with my horse and the pretty landscape. Thanks to the horrible horse models, the limited interactions and the bad camera handling in free riding, that feeling, that desire to ride around and take pleasure in simply being was completely missing from the game for me. 

Riding anywhere ends up feeling like a chore, and I used the fast travel mechanic wherever possible. A dishonorable mention for additional weirdness goes to the fact that once you live in the village, you can ride your horse to the stud farm in the morning, without accounting for the fact that your horses are housed at the farm.

To partake in riding competitions (Dressage, Jumping, Cross Country and Eventing), you need to train your horses’ skills to the appropriate level. After winning a competition however, you unlock new horses to buy at the Breeding Center, and quickly have more than enough money (“tokens”) to buy as many as you could want. These new horses often come with better stats and existing skill levels that makes it pointless to train your low level horses.

I appreciated the complexity and variety in the different training disciplines, and would even go as far as saying that the jumping and cross country training is fun to play, at least after a very frustrating first attempt where I struggled with the controls. 

The Dressage training is fine on paper, but it just takes up so, so much time.

Lunging is mostly about keeping your mouse within the pink space.

Dressage on the other hand completely overstays its welcome on just about every occasion. While a jumping course usually takes a minute or two and an XC track is two to three minutes long, the dressage exercises and competitions drag on for up to ten minutes in some cases, often with lengthy stretches where you have to do absolutely nothing except perhaps hold the “collect” or “extend” key. The general idea that you have to match the expected gaits, enter arrow sequences for special moves, or remember the shape of figures is solid, but the execution is severely lacking and dressage training ended up being torturously boring for me in most cases. 

The foals you breed take a rather long time – two in-game years – to grow up and become rideable. This is nice in terms of almost-realism, but the timeline of it all renders raising horses utterly pointless, since a home-bred foal will end up with much worse stats than what you can buy by the time it’s old enough to ride. 

I imagine that anyone playing this as a kid back in the day had the time and patience to simply keep playing after the story’s end and raising horses for the sheer joy of riding horses you’ve bred yourself, but for me as a new and adult player with a lower tolerance for a bad User Experience, the breeding just ended up being entirely irrelevant. 

To breed a foal, you ride to the breeding center and select parent horses.

Foals can be interacted with, but take a while to grow up.

Second Impressions 

As the story developed, I found myself more and more appreciative of the characters and their writing. Emma and Oliver develop an endearing dynamic, and even many otherwise unimportant side characters receive a detailed backstory that you can discover by chatting them up on a regular basis. There are a number of humorous scenes that are genuinely funny, such as when Oliver gets trapped in a hidden part of the Church, only for the priest to mistake his cries for help as a sign from God. 

The game has its funny moments…

… as well as its darker ones.

Petz Horsez 2 does not shy away from skirting darker subjects either, with a few chapters towards the end feeling fairly unsettling, as the threat of the stud farm’s demise looms closer. 

The plot and dialogues are perhaps no narrative masterpiece, but the game presents an absolutely solid story for a teenage or young adult audience. Even positive modern examples like Rival Stars or Star Stable cannot compete with the fully animated and voice acted main quest in terms of production value.

I frequently found myself surprised by how many different mechanics and plot points the story offered, from some stealth-like gameplay to classic adventure item-combining, to a photography competition. 

Although I knew from the start that the game’s ending would be influenced by how many secondary goals the player completes, I failed to do all I wanted because I missed a low-level dressage competition early on and then did not get another chance to compete in one. 

I definitely recommend keeping multiple saves in the game: Personally, I realized too late that I had made a choice that kept me from completing an important part of the main quest that would have led me to the “good” ending. 

Outside of the story and adventure mechanics, I had multiple experiences of “omg I can DO THAT?” for gameplay features. It took me four hours of gameplay and multiple stomach ache treatments until I realized I could feed my horse. It took seven hours until I realized I could put my horse into the pasture and access the lunging and dialogue minigames there. It took even longer until I realized I could actually dismount from my horse in the countryside. 

The game’s manual can be found as a PDF online and would no doubt have cleared up these things earlier. But since the game is extensively tutorialized in many aspects, having these other features go unmentioned is odd, to say the least. That, or I missed these explanations while being bombarded with mechanics in the first few in-game days…

My total playtime came in at about 19 hours, though I’m sure one could rush through the story faster than that, or spend a lot more time with the horse training throughout and afterwards.

Town Hall Square: Autumn

Village Entrance: Winter

Conclusion

All in all, I can definitely see why Petz Horsez 2 has its place in many people’s mental best-of lists. As kids with a lot of time, all of us were a lot less sensitive to what can be called an awful User Experience. The modern horse games I’ve played all offer significantly less to like than this one, even with all its issues. 

Not for the first time, I realized while playing that I need to finally get around to review Windstorm: Ari’s Arrival, which may be the only modern example that can offer real competition as a proper horse-themed adventure game. 

I can’t claim that I would have wanted to play through Petz Horsez 2 nowadays if not for the desire to write this review, and I quit right away once I was done with the main story, rather than continue playing the “horse game” part of it.

Just about everything in this game, from movement to riding to training, feels like a chore and the horses are a pain to look at. The story and characters are entertaining and endearing, but hardly spectacular enough to justify putting up with the gameplay if you’re not into it. 

Petz Horsez 2 offers an impressive variety of mechanics though, and modern competitors leave a lot to be desired. Anyone looking for a horse-themed adventure game who has a bit of patience for the game’s shortcomings may well get their money’s worth with this one even in 2020, especially since you can get it for well under 10 bucks on Steam. 

If this were remade nowadays with a streamlined UI/UX and pretty horse models, it could make for a quality horse adventure game in this otherwise underserved genre. As it is, I leave it to any player’s own best estimate of how much you’re willing to put up with in terms of clunky controls and wonky horses. 

I suppose I have to once again close a review with a variation of the same conclusion: I guess this is fairly entertaining considering we have so few good games to play. 

Petz Horsez 2 is available on Steam for Windows PCs.

Addendum: Although decade-old horse games surely make up for a negligible part of Ubisoft’s revenue, this may not be the time to support the company with your money: I encourage you to read about recent revelations with regards to the company’s workplace culture and allegations of abuse. 

Whether these issues had any bearing on the development of this game in particular I do not know, but I consider it the responsibility of games media to stop separating workplace abuse from game reviews, so readers and players can make their own informed decisions for which companies to support.