The Mane Quest 🐴🎮 Horses in Video Games 🎮🐴

@themanequest.com

1357 Followers 103 Following

The Mane Quest is a website dedicated to "horse games" and the portrayal of horses in video games. Always happy to learn about and give feedback to upcoming games with horses! 💖 themanequest.com created by Alice Ruppert malicedafirenze.bsky.social

screenshot from HORSE CLUB: RIDE WEST showing three girls riding alongside each other on horses, in a Canyon environment. A dog is running alongside them
the scooby do unmasking meme, with the masked culprit labeled "literally any sort of shoddy looking video game horse" and the unmasked version labeled "malbers horse animset pro"
Photo of an iphone 15 lying on a white surface screen-down. The case is black with white TMQ logos on it (a game controller that looks like a horse head)
key art for "Open Saddle". It shows two horse heads, a bay and a grey, in front of a background of fields and trees. A rounded board with western style lettering shows the game's title at the bottom. The image looks AI-generated to me, one of the more obvious tells is the way the rein attaches to the bit on the horse on the right.
screenshot of youtube comment exchange: @maliceruppert: not disclosing that these are all store-bought assets while talking about how realistic your game is gonna be and using genAI for the profile pic / key art sure is a choice @OpenSaddle: thanks for your comment! just to add some context: the assumption that everything shown is store content isn’t accurate. genuine question – how do you see asset origin relating to realism? @maliceruppert: the horse model and character model are premade assets though, right? My issue with the wording in your description is that you're advertising "Realistic muscle movement depending on gait and speed", but as far as I'm aware those are features of the asset, not of your own work on top. It's just really disingenuous to advertise your "progress" without disclosing how much of it you've built on ready-made building blocks. It looks like you're deliberately obscuring that part of the process so that people who don't happen to recognize individual horse assets are easily impressed by what you already have to show. But then again, using generative AI for profile pic and key art is a surefire sign that you don't respect artists and their work. For what it's worth, I didn't realize this was connected to Riding Out and I don't blame you for starting fresh. But what you've shown here looks and sounds exactly like every other overambitious and vague horse game project that I try to warn people off from getting invested in on The Mane Quest. If you genuinely want to build trust, ditch the genAI and build an actual prototype that's fun while it's blocks or sketches, and then people will absolutely forgive the strorebought horse animations. @OpenSaddle: i think we’re talking past each other a bit here. first, just to clarify: the assumption that even the character or clothing assets are not original work is not correct. [exchange continues, too long for alt text, let me know if you need the full text!]
screenshot from a discord poll: Which game would you like TMQ to play/review? Options: Revisiting RDR2 (finish story, analyse horses) Red Dead Online equestrian communities Ecos: La Brea The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Vintage Story & Horse Mods
Even so, please note that this article is in no way a review of the whole game. If you’re not interested in detailed analysis of horse animation, then you’ve come to the wrong website. But this is The Mane Quest and complaining extensively about how horse legs work or don’t work is what we do. Let’s begin.
screenshot from the site traffic insights of The Mane Quest, showing total yearly traffic from 2018 to 2025 as a black on white graph. The curve rises steeply from 2018 to 2020, then drops a bit until 2023, where it rises again. The 2025 point is higher than 2020, i.e. the highest ever, at a bit under 300k visits. At the top of the screenshot, you can also see a total of 1.3M visits, a Bounce Rate of 77.89%, 1.1M Unique visitors and 2M pageviews
screenshot of the Steam store capsule for horse racing manager, cursor is hovering over the 51 Very Positive reviews to show that 90% are positive. Full text on: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2740170/Horse_Racing_Manager/
footage from Equinox: Homecoming, showing a woman on a horse riding through fields and forests, with overlaid greenscreen of me talking about the game.
screenshot of a discord poll saying "Pebbles or Roach". 4 people voted Pebbles, 2 people voted Roach, 20 people voted Yes. (Pebbles is the horse from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Roach is the horse from The Witcher)
Screenshot from the SteamDB Page of The Ranch of Rivershine, showing the total player graph over maximum time with a clear peak at the end for Release with over twice as many players as around the initial Early Access release
"I'm making my own horse game!" Bingo card The bingo squares are: Like RDR2 but just horses Dev process starts with making horse models Open World has not made a game before what even is a core loop "what else would you like to see in a horse game" Like SSO but better multiplayer "not like other horse games" but fails to articulate actual USPs multiple breeds has 50 saddle pad colors, doesn't have gameplay environment: idk generic hills and forests REALISTIC (middle square) working title includes "horse" and "game" showjumping! (dressage planned!) "oh yeah I've also been disappointed by other horse games promising too much and not delivering" (arrow pointing to previous square) zero reflection on why that might have been the case devlogs consists of endless reworks of the existing horse model avoids the "you've inherited a farm" cliche by just wordlessly giving you a farm anyway has community discord, does not have playable prototype "might add Western riding later!" first horse is a generic warmblood breed setting: vaguely modern, vaguely European story coming soon! disappears from the face of the earth after realizing that finishing games is actually hard text below the bingo squares: **seriously I love y'all's passion but you need to start by making and finishing tiny projects. Your first game should be finished in a day and I'm not joking. Take literally any "my first game" tutorial and just add horses. Finish 10 tiny games before you even consider something bigger.
Screenshot from the Supporters' Pack of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, showing a horse covered in medieval fantasy armor. It stands on a patch of grass next to a road.
Screenshot from Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, showing the ingame horse. It's the Horse Animset Pro asset
screenshot of the steam capsule art & description for Equinox: Homecoming, showing that the game has 84% positive reviews at 83 total reviews, released yesterday by Blue Scarab Entertainment
screenshot from the 2003 game Mein Pferdehof, showing a cartoony horse in its stall
Gameplay clips from My Life: Riding Stables 3, showing horse customization, horse care and riding/training in the open world, in a stylized, brightly colored art style
Screenshot from My Life: Riding Stables 3. Horse and rider stand facing each other, there's an open barn and hay feeder in the background. The horse is tacked up and wears a traffic cone as a hat.
screenshot of /r/gameswithhorses on reddit, showing three posts asking for specific horse game recommendations
Screenshot of a bluesky post about the Unbridled release date announcement, it has 3 reposts and 10 likes
screenshot from My Horse: Bonded Spirits: a rider on a horse trotting along the edge of a village. The mood is grey, the level of detail is low.
a bingo card titled "horse game title bingo". The squares are: my [horse term], star, wild, literally contains 'horse game', completely different game was published under the same name on a handheld platform, land, race z instead of s, adventures, ride/riding, 25+ characters, random famous equestrian, horse (free space), completely unrelated titles in different languages/regions, equestrian, exclamation mark!, horseshoe in title logo, equi-something, world, stable, horse girl franchise branding, club, champion, secret, jumping
Screenshot of the website themanequest.com, including several article about horse-focused video games