Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories Announcement: Teaser Trailer and Developer Insight

Wild River Games has announced a sequel to their 2021 game Horse Club Adventures: Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories will be coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Steam in October 2022. 

A teaser trailer was revealed earlier this week:

From teaser and announcement, we already know that the new game is once again going to feature the Schleich Horse Club girls, and take place near Lakeside and the newly added village of Hazelwood. 
I’ve been in contact with Wild River Games’ Michael Hengst, who you may remember from last year’s dev interview and community AMA, as well as the game’s producer Stefan Kummer and game designer Daniel Boos, in order to give you some exclusive details about what to expect from Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories.

Feedback and Improvements

“You’ll spend a lot of time riding through the world with the Horse Club friends,” the team says in response to my question about important improvements since the first HCA. “The world will be a lot more lively, and there will be more variety in locations such as the detailed village of Hazelwood, a swamp and a mountain range. There’s a lot to discover, and the long rides through the world become more diverse because of it.”

Stefan and Daniel add that HCA2 will be fully voice acted, an important factor in accessibility for younger players in particular. 

To pick and prioritize possible improvements for the sequel, the Wild River team collected feedback in Amazon Reviews, Emails received from players, as well as our own Horses & Video Games communities on Discord and Facebook. 

“Some of the feedback we were able to implement, some unfortunately not,” the team admits. They add that my article about the 8 Common Horse Mistakes I want Game Developers to Stop Making was a heated topic of internal discussion. 

“We’ve added a lot of interactions between the player character and their horse, such as hugging, petting, removing the saddle and leading the horse,” say the developers. “There’s even some progression there, you can develop your friendship with the horse to unlock new abilities.”

Riding Disciplines and Inspirations

The game’s announcement contains various interesting tidbits, such as promising a little dog who becomes a loyal companion in the game, as well as a screenshot mode with image editing options – that being a feature which I dearly missed in my review of the first game. 

One other feature advertised there caught my eye in particular:

Demonstrate your skill on horseback in a variety of riding disciplines and competitions, for instance in Western riding, dressage and show jumping.

Dressage used to be relatively commonly included in the horse games of the early 00s, but it has been a while since any traditionally published horse game has tried to tackle the subject. More often than not, some form of obstacle race is the only available riding discipline.

Western riding is even more rarely covered: while games like Star Stable Online offer some pole and barrel races on the side and Red Dead Redemption 2 covers some people’s desires for cowboy roleplay, true Western riding games were rare even during the golden age of horse games almost twenty years ago. There’s definitely a lot of unexplored potential in both disciplines, but how will HCA2 go about tackling them?

“We’ve looked at various games for inspiration, and not only the ‘classic’ horse games,” say Stefan and Daniel. “The gallop feature that was criticized in the TMQ review was revised significantly, for which we took inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”

The screenshots tease what dressage and western riding might look like, but for further mechanical details on the riding disciplines, we’ll unfortunately have to wait for the next trailer. 

When asked about the screenshot below on the left though, Stefan admits that there will be a portion of the story dedicated to the topic of wild horses. “It’s a subject I would love to expand further on in the future, if we get the chance,” he adds. 

Limitations and Potential

“Yes, we still use the Horse Animset Pro Asset Pack,” admit the developers when I point out the familiar issues with bendy horse legs, as seen in the screenshot above on the right. “We are still a fairly small team and our budget is limited. An additional factor are the technical restrictions of the Nintendo Switch.”

That doesn’t mean no effort was put into improvements in this area however: “We were able to add a technical artist to the team for HCA2, which allowed us to adjust some of the existing animations, as well as make performance improvements for the Nintendo Switch: the game runs more smoothly despite having more moving parts at a time. Numerous animations were additionally created from scratch, for example for the dressage mechanics.”

For future projects, the Wild River Games team hopes to move away from the “infamous” asset pack entirely, Stefan and Daniel claim. “We want to work with our own tools where possible!” 

That HCA2 is working with numerous limitations in terms of budget and team size should come as a surprise to no one who has read my writing on traditionally published horse games and how they’re made. I do consider the team’s obvious eagerness to take feedback to heart incredibly promising though: I’ve often mused that many common issues with horse games could be avoided not only by throwing more money at the problem but by using resources smartly. That the Wild River team is listening so closely to the community’s input is wonderfully heartening to me. 

The first Horse Club Adventures was already a quite solid game, with obvious flaws, yes, but also with a lot of heart and quality. I’m thrilled to see the sequel improve on that basis – and of course to have worthy competition for our own Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch when the two games release later this year.