Review: My Horse: Bonded Spirits is a Fresh Take on Horse Games, but Unfortunately Not a Very Good One
My Horse: Bonded Spirits first caught my eye (and ire) when its CG-rendered announcement trailer released in Spring 2023. I’ve thoroughly outlined my reasons for scepticism in this article, so rather than recap what I found initially shady, today we’re looking at the actual game itself: What fresh ideas it brings to the table, what it offers in terms of content, and of course: how the actual release compares to that initial trailer.
After being released on Steam of PC in June 2024, My Horse: Bonded Spirits has also come to the PlayStation 5 store in December. I’ve played the PC version and can’t elaborate on differences between the versions, but I hope my review can help some console players decide whether or not this game is worth it for them nonetheless.
Getting Started
My Horse: Bonded Spirits startled its first disbelieving laugh out of me with its premise and intro: a camera pans over lush landscapes while the subtitles wax on about how your father’s horse ranch just needs a little love, before cutting to “Love that you don’t have. You’re here as a punishment after all” and revealing that your player character’s backstory is having gambled away their father’s money. It’s just missing a record scratch sound effect.
You can play as a male or female avatar and initially only little variety for customizations, with the option to unlock more coming later .
I found the opening sequence quite motion sickness inducing, so heads up to maybe skip it if you’re also sensitive to that sort of thing.
Do I think this is the kind of story and premise a horse game absolutely needed? Perhaps not. But I am quite ready for any departure from the good old “you’ve inherited a run-down farm” premise (which this isn’t that far away from, admittedly) and I enjoy that My Horse: Bonded Spirit doesn’t just dare to make their premise and its presentation silly and unexpected, but also that it thereby firmly establishes an adult main character rather than a child or adolescent.
Your first gameplay interactions are closely tutorialized and holding you by the hand through dialogue and simple goals as you learn to care for your horse, buy a saddle for it and of course start riding.
The game’s early missions guide you through horse care step by step
To my surprise, the dialogues and characters remained a highlight for me: The bar for “funniest horse game” is admittedly not super high, but I found unexpected delight in always choosing the snarky option and getting shade from the NPCs in return.
An aspect of the gameplay that I liked – and that I’ve never seen in any other horse game for some reason – is the inventory and item management. My Horse: Bonded Spirit uses a toolbar and backpack the way you might know and recognize it from any farming or crafting game you’ve played, from Stardew Valley to Minecraft to My Time at Sandrock. The user experience here isn’t anything to write home about (why can’t I scroll through items by mouse wheel, for example?), but it is solid in principle, and it’s a system of interaction and inventory that I would love to see applied more to horse games in general.
I told Robbie I had arachnophobia and couldn’t possibly sleep in the old farm house with spiders.
Quest dialogues will sometimes over text messages or phone calls in addition to meeting NPCs in person.
Riding, Care, Bonding
The titular bonding with your horse is rather straightforward: grooming your horse, petting it, and simply spending time with it while its needs are met increase your bond over time, unlocking skills and upgrades over the course of the game. Horse Skills, Rider Skills and Bonding Progress are presented as three separate “skill trees” – though that word falsely implies choice, when it’s simply a linear unlocking process – but the actual skills and perks that become available have a lot of overlap, and I’m not sure it’s actually possible to level your horse, player and bond independently of one another. Some of the upgrades are even exactly the same things but shuffled around a bit so it looks like more variety.
The Unlock tree for Horse Skills and Rider skills look almost identical, and even share a few of the exact same perks for some reason.
I like the idea of water crossing as a skill your horse learns through bonding, but I can’t say I noticed this change in gameplay.
Caring for your horse also includes filling up its grain and water buckets and mucking out its stall, though it’s unfortunately not really clear (either from tutorialization nor from the gameplay effects) which of those actions are really necessary, since you can also just refill your horse’s hunger bar by feeding it apples, carrots, and sugar cubes. The toilet meter can fix itself outside just as easily and the horse’s coat gets dirty really quick regardless of the state of its stall, as far as I can tell. All of this looks like a nice variety of features and needs and chores at a glance, but the game’s logic doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
I don’t mind a bit of digital shit-shoveling, but I wish the bedding in the stall actually looked clean afterwards.
That horses have preferences for which treats they like is a neat detail.
The horses themselves are using the Horse Animset Pro model and animation set, which makes them kind of okay but subpar in all the ways that the asset pack itself is kind of okay but subpar, meaning that the overly bendy forelegs often make it look like the horse crouches in physically impossible ways. Sigh.
Something I appreciate about the riding is that the game takes its time with a few initial riding lessons at a walk and trot before even unlocking the canter gait. The trot feels a bit too slow to be a satisfying way to get around, but I do like that the game simulates this learning process instead of just letting you gallop around right from the start. Even once all gaits are unlocked, the riding unfortunately feels quite sluggish, which makes many of the various riding challenges quite tedious. The game gives you ‘automatic’ and ‘manual’ mode options for controlling your gait and speed, but even with the manual version – which I generally vastly prefer – switching gaits feels slow and unreactive. Many of these issues persist later in the game even though the horse controls improve slightly by levelling up your mount’s “Responsiveness” over time.
Your very first ride happens on a predefined path and at a walk.
Sometimes, your bonding level will jump upwards drastically because it’s scripted as part of a mission, as seen here.
This is particularly awkward in Barrel Racing competitions, a discipline that’s essentially all about accelerating fast and then riding tight turns without breaking strides. Having to slow to a trot to make it around barrels and taking what feels like multiple seconds to initiate the canter again unfortunately takes both the fun and realism out of the mechanic – the alternative is just riding wide berths at a gallop. Barrel Racing has a number of interesting patterns beyond the standard three barrel one, while every single jumping course feels awkward and unsatisfying in its obstacle placement. Cross Country courses are probably the least frustrating, but there’s only a small handful of them to be found in one location of the game world, while the available flat racing courses are set in a nicely huge arena, but utterly uninteresting in the gameplay sense.
For some reason, most of the jumping courses force you to stay at a trot instead of a canter.
Even with a level 9 horse, it takes 5 seconds to go from standing to cantering. Note that I don’t actually need to go around the barrels, just graze the checkpoint.
World and Exploration
After the initial missions give you just enough experience to unlock going at a canter, the gates of the home stable unlock alongside, giving you access to open world of Chestnut Glen. Your initial trip outside the farm loses its sense of adventure because the game gives you waypoints to follow rather than letting you find your own way, but this is fortunately dropped in subsequent missions that take you across the map.
The main problem with this game’s claim to the “explore an open world!” feature is that there’s barely anything to find. An apple orchard and carrot patch where you can pick up treats or collect extra items to sell is neat, but would have been infinitely more rewarding if there weren’t literally just one of each such spots on the whole map. Finding new training courses is a nice aspect of the exploration, but the fact that some of them are minutes and minutes away from the home base with no fast travel options meant I always rushed through all available courses right when finding them so I wouldn’t have to ride the whole way out again to finish.
The apple and carrot icons on that map are the only places where you can actually find items to pick up.
There are some pretty looking landmarks and scenic spots that are satisfying to initially discover, but for the most part riding around the world is immensely boring and unsatisfying, in terms of both gameplay AND environment. That I occasionally have to dismount to feed and brush my horse would be a welcome change of pace, but being able to sate all my horses needs while “on the road” in turn makes returning to the stable feel pointless. I found a neat little town on the opposite end of the map but all the NPCs I can interact with are right on the barn property, which just screams missed opportunity, when “visit the vet” or “visit the farrier” could have just as well been exploration missions. (Worth noting that those two NPCs have to be visited once as part of the tutorial and then there’s no reason I found to ever visit them again as part of the actual gameplay loop).
This large race track is a cool spot, but I find many of the textures and colors too monotonously brown to work well.
This Nordic Stave Church is one of a handful of pretty landmarks to find in the world. It too is a premade asset.
This village would have been a cool place to find, but unfortunately there is literally nothing to do here except to ride through and take a few pictures.
Backgrounds like these rock formations add to an overall cheap and careless presentation.
Filling the world with a few collectible items that can be sold for money would have been a very simple and cheap way to make exploration significantly more rewarding, but as is, the game gives you no reason to ride out into the world outside of missions or even to take a detour along untravelled roads. There doesn’t even seem to be any benefit to riding around on my horse, since my bonding meter rises when the horse is cared for regardless of whether I’m anywhere near the animal.
That the environments are visually monotonous, often empty and sometimes visibly unfinished and unpolished sure doesn’t help either. I generally don’t fault a game for using a lot of store bought 3D assets, but the resulting environments are unfortunately just not particularly interesting to look at in their arrangements.
Content Scope and Playtime
I reached the end of main mission content after around 6-7 hours of playtime. The last hour or so of that playtime was spent with the ultimate goal of “reach level 10 in bonding with your horse”, which was unfortunately already quite boring, as the challenge of it essentially boiled down to keeping my horses needs met and riding around the (rather uninteresting, for the reasons outlined above) game world. Once level ten is reached, ranch hand Robbie congratulates you on your achievement… and promptly asks you if you want to get a new horse now. I know I said I appreciate the unexpected snark in the game’s dialogue, but the fact that the words “I’ve noticed that you and your horse really are Bonded Spirits” are followed immediately by “You can ditch it and get a new one, if you want” feels unceremonious and unsatisfying to a degree I couldn’t even laugh about.
Considering that bonding with my horse is supposedly the main theme and goal of this game, I’m sure there would have been better options for how to present the player with the “New Game +” choice.
Next to main missions and bonding progress, the game also offers a stable management feature that I find interesting in theory, but utterly lacking in its execution: You can buy additional stalls and horses, but then can’t interact with them in any way and there’s not even any indication as to whether or not these horses need your care in their stalls. You can assign horses and employees to units of training or competition, which would be an interesting way to earn money on the side, but the user feedback and motivation design feels thoroughly half-assed. The barely existent feedback for what you’ve been doing makes these interactions confusing and dissatisfying. While the steam page advertises that you’ll “rebuild” your stud farm, there’s not actually any significant change going on here over the course of the gameplay.
Stable Management is accessed through the player’s phone menu, but is badly explained and unsatisfying.
Additional horses show up in the remaining stalls, but can’t be interacted with outside of the Stable Management menu
Customizing your horse’s tack and your player character’s clothing works alright, and I’m easily satisfied with a simple photo mode that lets me capture the results, so that’s neat, but also not something to really keep a player entertained for much longer. Horse customization options are a mixed bag from the nicely creative (dragon wing rug and hoof boots) and to the nonsensical, such as an oddly geometric looking braided tail and a breastplate that attaches to a shoulder girth.
Player Customization
Horse Customization: the braided tail is a bit strange
Horse Customization: I like that hoof boots were included at all, that’s rare!
Horse Customization: this dragon rug is a fun option.
There are a few other features that are technically there, but completely disappointing in terms of the value they add to gameplay: “upgrades” for your house consist of choosing a different texture for walls and furniture. Do that three times or so and your buildings count as “upgraded”, even though you choose from the same set of textures every time. Early dialogues hint that you can herd chickens to their coop and find collectible horse plushies in the world, but both of those side mechanics flat out did not work for me, and based on some conversations on Games Incubator’s official Discord, I’m apparently not the only player with that problem.
Technical Issues
On top of the various issues with the user experience already outlined, My Horse: Bonded Spirits suffers further from a bunch of technical issues: I spent a solid twenty minutes when first launching the game struggling to find graphics settings that worked for me, because the resolution kept resetting to such a low number of pixels that I couldn’t even read the other resolution options. During gameplay, autosave triggers at seemingly random moments and causes several seconds of lag, which can completely mess up your competition scores if that happens to coincide.
I encountered a number of mildly annoying but harmless glitches such as my horse clipping itself out of the stall door or my player character suddenly standing on the steed’s croup when dismounted. In the open world there are a handful of misplaced colliders or flipped normals that make it possible to ride into large half-visible rocks and not being able to get out again, as well as water planes not connecting properly and breaking the illusion of a natural environment. I fortunately didn’t run into any game-breaking issues and was able to work around some things, for example by placing things out of and back into my toolbar when I suddenly wasn’t able to equip them anymore.
This sort of glitch doesn’t happen all the time, but this also wasn’t the only occurrence. I then had to mount my horse to ride back into its stall, because there’s no leading option.
Ah yes, definitely how rivers work.
Shady Business?
Before we move onto my final thoughts, let’s take a quick look back at what the announcement trailer promised and how the actually released game compares: That early pre-rendered trailers are aspirational and don’t look like actual gameplay is something that used to be very common in the AAA gaming space, but the key difference here is that those fancy CGI trailers usually don’t deliberately mislead players by including a pseudo user interface to make their animated footage look like actual gameplay. It’s no coincidence, I suspect, that the Steam page for My Horse: Bonded Spirits no longer contains that initial trailer because the misleading aspects – like the much less impressive lighting and textures, or that the “fix and repair” mechanics don’t seem to have made it into the game – would now be obvious.
Announcement Trailer visuals….
… versus promotional footage for the released game.
That isn’t the only matter of questionable ethics around this game though: When the game’s free “Prologue” was released in March 2024, it received numerous positive reviews praising the game in ways that had little to do with the game’s actual content, sounding transparently AI-generated and coming from accounts that had hours of playtime without getting any of the simple achievements for basic gameplay aspects like feeding or riding your horse for the first time. I posted details and receipts on Twitter at the time, if you want to see more.
Oddly enough, the team also posted a Steam News article proclaiming that the game had been nominated in the Sit Back and Relax Category of the Steam Awards, which is simply not true. All Steam games are available to be nominated in their release year, but need votes for an actual nomination. Whether the headline is deliberately misleading or just a misunderstanding on part of the devs, I can only guess at.
Also note that the developers confirmed that the game’s Prologue version used AI generated voices instead of actors, and I am not entirely sure if these have been replaced for the full version. No voice actors are included in the game’s credits screen.
Conclusion
Where does all that leave us, is My Horse: Bonded Spirits worth playing? I think my answer to that question is once again a deep, beleaguered sigh. It’s definitely not the worst game I’ve had the displeasure of playing for this website, and the ways in which it is bad are at least a change of pace from the various low budget, traditionally published, half-baked kids’ games I’ve reviewed in the past.
My Horse: Bonded Spirits does bring some fresh cool features to the table with its approach to stable management, horse care and bonding, but then doesn’t manage to pull through on making those elements feel satisfying and rewarding to play. The dry humor in its dialogues made me cackle a few times, though I can’t really say it’s worth buying for the comedy alone either. Some additional bugfixing time and improvements to the user experience could go a long way on this one… but apart from one patch shortly after release, the team at Games Incubator has not communicated any intentions for further additions. My inquiry on update plans via Discord has been met with a non-committal “we will post any new info about the game when we have something”.
Between traditionally published kids’ games with barely any dev budget and ambitious indie projects that go all the way in terms of horse variety but don’t get around to having a proper gameplay loop, My Horse: Bonded Spirits puts an interesting new dot on the map. It’s feels cheap, looks bland and lacks polish, and yet contains numerous details that I would like to see more of in horse games and that some of its competitors could even learn from.
So do I recommend it? Not really. But in my endless optimism, I consider its existence a step forward because hey at least someone new has realized that horse-loving gamers could be a profitable audience.
My Horse: Bonded Spirits is available on Steam for PC and on PlayStation 5. The Mane Quest was provided with a free review key for the PC Version.
