The current March of Giants beta ends today at midnight, so if anything in this article seems cool, download it literally right now, because there isn’t another playtest till 2027.
I love MOBAs just as much as I love CCGs, and while the two types of games are quite different (real time vs turn based, digital vs analog, team vs single player) one thing they do tend to have in common is their iron grip over their player-base as lifestyle games. The grip often extends to their players wallets.
It’s not really surprising to me then that Ubisoft would try to make a MOBA. It’s surprising to me that they’re trying to do it in 2026.
March of Giants is a 4v4 MOBA, in the vein of Dota 2 and League of Legends (More LoL then dota, but more on that later), with a few twists on the on that standard MOBA formula. Winning requires knocking out two of your opponents three bastions, you can build RTS style base defenses, and leveling up doesn’t grant skill points.
But the really cool thing about March of Giants is it’s Rally system. The smallest creeps in the game, “rifle core” will cluster around and follow giants up to their rally value. They can be directed to charge enemy giants, objectives, and resources, or sent out in small scouting parties for vision.
If they hit an enemy giant, they’ll scale that giant Gullivers travels style, and inflict a chunk of damage that slowly ticks down. (Basically, if you send 50 soldiers, and they inflict 300 total damage, it will be applied as a tickdown until all damage is applied, but even if the enemy has less then 250 health, they won’t instantly die.)
Charges can also be redirected to wrap around pillboxes, or catch someone off guard.
It’s a fantastically weird and fun system, almost like a MOBA expression of games like Pikmin. Rifle core units also aren’t worth resources, so losing/misusing them is punished more in terms of opportunity cost then anything else.
I don’t have too many other thoughts on the giants themselves/balance/etc. I’m very bad at the game by my standard, and I’ll also note that March of Giants is using what I’d consider to be a League of Legends blueprint as opposed to Dota 2, which I’m far more familiar with. This can be seen in low mana costs/cooldowns, an AP/AD split as opposed stats, and a heavy focus on micro.
These aren’t intrinsically bad things, but the thousands of hours I have in Dota 2 don’t translate into an understanding/evaluation of them as effectively as I suspect they might for League players.
That said, I am concerned about the shelf life of this game. I think these systems are cool, but I don’t see myself replacing Dota with it, and it’s a shame, because some of these mechanics are really cool, and I’d love to see what skilled players can do with them. I do think I’ll play for a fair amount when it does release, if only to get as much time as in before it does close down.
Despite games being my primary hobby, every now and then I’ll find myself tumbling into a subgenre of design thats been around for two decades, and that I’ve never touched. Tank games are one of those. Despite decades of banner ads, I’d never actually tried World of Tanks/Planes/etc, as no one had actually recommended them to me.
For various reasons, Tyr appealed more to me than other entries in genre, and so I actually did end up clicking on an ad for the game. And I’m glad I did, this shits great. Along with some friends, we’ve all ended up playing 50+ hours of this over the last few weeks.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Tyr a 8v8 tank shooter played in 10 minute rounds. Players are spawned on two opposing sides of a semi-symmetrical map, and a team wins by either eliminating every tank on the opposing side, or reaching and holding a capture point. There are also various tiebreakers if time expires, but I’ve never actually seen these come into play, as they mostly exist to force one side to make aggressive moves at all points in the game.
Okay, this is all fairly standard sorts of shooter stuff so far. What makes Tyr great is how the tank combat works. I’m not sure how much of this is genre specific vs game specific so I’m going to go over all of it.
First of all, the shooting. Since everyone is driving a tank, a giant armored vehicle, it is entirely possible to shoot, hit the enemy dead on, and do absolutely no damage, because you shot their armor. Instead, you have to find angles where you can actually inflict damage. Going a step further, it’s also possible to shoot enemies and temporarily take out sub-systems on the tank, like shooting their tracks so they can’t move, or around their gun barrel to stop them from firing.
The Mauler. Note that almost everything is black, indicating that those shots won’t do anything. The Kestral with weaker plating is something I can actually shoot.
Additionally, aiming uses a focusing mechanic. Your targeting reticle starts out as a fairly large rectangle, and your shots will end up somewhere in that rectangle. However, waiting will slowly scale down the size of the rectangle, and waiting long enough turns it into a point. Combine this with the fact that reload time can be over 10 seconds, it’s much more important to actually take your time to hit your shot.
Second, fog of war/camouflage. It’s a standard in MOBA’s, but I hadn’t seen it done in an FPS before. The way it works is that you always have vision of the terrain/map, but each tank has a spotting radius, and if an enemy tank is outside of everyone on your teams spotting radius, or hidden in a bush, even if you can see the location they’re in, you can’t see them. This doesn’t mean you can’t shoot them, but it does make it much harder to actually hit them.
From this distance, I can only see the larger tanks. Driving closer reveals the rest of the crew.
Finally, in addition to having a general variety of stats (HP, Armour, hitbox, top speed, etc) all the tanks have some sort of active ability which uses energy to activate. I mostly play Phantom and Mauler, so I’ll use those two as my primary examples.
Phantom is a light tank with high mobility, and almost no armor. It’s a hover tank, so it can aim well from cliffs, and is quite fast, but it can also get one-shot in the wrong situation. It’s active is a temporary cloaking, making it invisible for a short period of time, allowing it to reposition and scout while remaining undetected itself.
Mauler is a heavy tank. It’s slow, heavily armored from the front, and it’s active ability is a ram that does heavy damage, smashing into and knocking back the tanks it hits.
And the abilities are fun! Ikarus can temporarily turn into a little plane(AeroGavin eat your heart out), Arbalest gets to temporarily turn into a super long range sniper, Fortis build walls, Ark plants shrubbery, and Tempest can teleport around a bit.
Why I like it
The end result of all the mechanics is a much, much more deliberate shooter then anything I’ve played recently. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s because I’m bad, but as much as I love things like Deadlock, I just can’t seem to really play twitch FPS these days.
It’s also incredibly fun to play in a stack, with folks calling out flanks, or having one person scout ahead to set up for snipers, or just have everyone go Ikarus, and attempt to dive bomb the enemy. (This does not work, do not do it if you want to win.)
The tank abilities are also fun, and feel unique, even if it can be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve found that my friends are much better at finding good opening routes then I am, so I tend to copy their strategies.
Some Small Complaints
Tyr isn’t perfect. My biggest complaint about the game, small party sizes, is actually fixed now, leading to my second biggest complaint: ping only communication. For a game that’s so heavily based on coordination, having to sort of vibe your way throw that isn’t great.
I do also kind of wish there were more gamemodes then just the “1 life and dead” primary mode, but I suppose they probably don’t want to split the playerbase.
Also, I don’t love the leveling system. Some tanks are just much, much worse before you get them fully leveled, and while this doesn’t take a particularly long amount of time, it’s annoying to fully level a tank to discover you don’t really like it’s play pattern.
Overall
Tyr is good, I like playing it, and oddly enough literally everyone else in my friend group also likes playing it. It’s a very different type of shooter then most other FPS’s I’ve played, but I can’t say that I know how to compare it to other entries in the genre, as I’ve never played them.
It’s a very deliberate, patient experience, and I enjoy that about it. There’s a fun tension of carefully waiting, or having to actually think through if taking a shot is worth it, as opposed to just going for a spray and pray.
Tyr’s free to play on Steam, and I unlocked all the tanks after about 40 hours or so. I don’t know if you can spend real money for progress. There are some cosmetics, but they’re pretty limited. If you’ve ever liked FPS games, I recommend giving it a shot.
There are a lot of things that go into writing about a game for this blog. Sometimes it’s desperation. When Sunday rolls around and I scrounge through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Sometimes it’s joy. I prefer when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).
Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. This is a post about nostalgia. A frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person than it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.
Just to be as clear as possible:if you do not want to listen to a 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.
Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo-MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo-MMO rather than a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts. But if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, and grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash and what was technically capable in 2009.
This is normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here,. Even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.
In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing most of the time.
Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.
Welcome to 2009
Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time than middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games is growing, and there’s just one problem: I never actually get to play them. My screen time limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.
Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friend’s house. Relatives’ places at Thanksgiving. Home again.
It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.
From this standpoint, then, Adventure Quest Worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.
In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this. And unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.
Glasses off, analysis on.
With the value of hindsight, Adventure Quest Worlds didn’t do much that other, bigger games hadn’t beaten it to punch on. Everquest had been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.
Its defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement, and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these drops were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars: events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!
As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the community’s success or engagement. But as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.
The defining feature, then, of AQW, was that it truly pioneered the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.
Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now
I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully on board. I loved the design notes (a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week) with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.
But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More than anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltaire, Paul and Storm: these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.
If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.
If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this story. At some point in High school, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of Glacier National Park, I remember very little of it.
But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company. And I was just completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happened. I doubt even he remembers.
From 2008-ish to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.
Returning to 2026
I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort. Not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.
Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.
I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite its update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon than Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market. In an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.
The story is, at best, mediocre, and at worst actually bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. Its endgame hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoke a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me. The sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots.
But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.
Back to the Past – 2011
This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.
There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more than a player. The game means more to me than I do to it.
Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine
This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more than anything else), I’d dissect why the game’s player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind for 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.
Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.
I’ve never really played sports games, but I’ve played a fair amount of golf games. This is because golf is not a sport. It’s an activity, like lawn darts or bowling. Golf in the real world is reserved exclusively for rich assholes: the sort of people who will ban Michael Jordan from their country club because he’s wearing the wrong pants, a real thing that actually happened.
Part of the problem, I think, is that golf is often a deeply unsatisfying activity. Every time I’ve ever picked up a club, there’s a little voice inside me screaming that it would be far more satisfying to give someone a good smack across the ankles with it than it would to hit some dinky little ball into a hole. This voice only grows louder with each missed putt as my score careens higher and higher, further and further out of actual contention.
The difference, though, is that Super Battle Golf is the first game to recognize that tension, and then design key systems around it.
The core system of Super Battle Golf is a fairly simple golf game. You have a club, you have a ball, and there is a hole. You need to get the ball into the hole to win. There is only a single type of club, and you can adjust the angle of your shot, and control the power by holding and releasing. Standard stuff, the chips in a metaphorical golf nachos. But the toppings are where everything gets interesting.
The first difference you might notice is that after hitting a ball, unlike many golf games, you do not follow the ball, or teleport to its resting spot to take another shot. Instead, you must walk there on your own, golf club in hand. Additionally, while there bonus are points for finishing under par, the majority of the scoring rewards being the FIRST person to reach the hole.
One way to be the first person to finish is, after taking your first swing, to turn and give the next closest golfer a swift thwack across the ankles, knocking them down, and setting you up for a second swing that can send them flying and ragdolling.
Alternately, if you time your first shot perfectly, you’ll get a boost of speed to start, often giving you the edge to rush forward and be the first to claim one of the game’s Mario Kart style item boxes. Players can hold up to 3 items, and unused items will be carried over to the next hole. Items generally fall into two categories: travel or combat, with my personal favorite, the elephant gun sitting neatly in both.
The secret sauce, the thing that really makes Super Battle Golf work, though, has to do with the boost system, and a special type of hit called a homing shot. First, the boost system.
When you hit another player in Super Battle Golf with an item box weapon, golf club, ball, or running them over in a golf cart, you get a temporary boost of movement speed. This speed is the key to pulling ahead of other players, because while everyone can be reasonably good at the golf part of the game, it’s more important to reach your ball as quickly as possible for the next stroke.
Critically, if you are losing, choosing to grief or attack other players around and in front of you isn’t kingmaking. Instead, it’s the mechanic by which you gain ground.
The same is true of homing shots. Without going into too much detail, you can hit shots so that they will track a player in front of you like a heat seeking missile. If it connects, it will knock that player down, giving you the aforementioned speed boost, while forcing them to wait out the knockdown.
This is what really differentiates Super Battle Golf from every other lite multiplayer golf game. It rewards and encourages combat, as opposed to just making it possible. And while it’s not the deepest combat ever, there is a fair amount of strategic decision making, politicking, and routing.
If I have any complaints, or reservations, it might be the map pool, and the always online voice chat. There are 27 holes, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. On the flip side, I find the always online voice chat incredibly funny, but that’s quite possibly because I have a deeply broken sense of humor.
Some “highlights” of the voice chat include: 1. The entire lobby grouping up to repeatedly pummel someone screaming a racial slur in a Russian accent. 2. Hearing “get Kirked” moments before being shot by someone with a dueling pistol. 3. A discussion about how shooting up schools is a real “white person” activity.
If you don’t find early XBox Live level (read: fucking cesspool) of interaction and voice chat funny, you will not have a good time online, and should probably stick to playing with your friends, or immediately mute everyone when you join a public lobby.
On the other hand, I find something deeply satisfying in using a rocket launcher on someone calling me a series of both inaccurate and offensive racial slurs.
Your personal mileage may vary.
Super Battle Golf is $7. It’s pretty great, but given that public lobbies are cesspools, I highly suggest getting it if you have 4-5 more friends you can play with. The game is best about 5-8 players, and while I wish there were more maps, the ones that do exist justify the price.
Ed Note: I generally consider Gametrodon to be fairly low-key, easy reading. Because of the content of the game in this review, that is not the case this week. Horses contains content many people will likely find offensive, shocking, and that some people may find triggering. I suggest reading the quoted content warning below before reading the rest of this review.
I’m going to save us some time here. Horses is a somewhat graphic and discomforting experience, but to me felt devoid of any real greater purpose or meaning. I don’t recommend it, even from a “experience uncomfortable art” perspective, as it’s not novel enough to deserve that.
Sometimes games are hard to write about because it’s difficult to find a good place to start. Horses on the other hand, sits on the other side of this. There are too many good places to start.
That said, after a little bit of thought, I think the only good place for me to start is the relevant part of the game’s content warning.
This game contains scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery (mutilation, blood), depictions of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny. The inclusion of these elements is intended to depict and characterize a fictional world and its fictional inhabitants. The presence of these elements is not an endorsement of them, nor do they reflect the beliefs or values of the creators. … Character dialogue also includes references to psychological trauma that may be upsetting, especially for those who may have had similar experiences in their pasts. Player discretion is advised. If you feel uncomfortable or upset while playing, please consider stepping away and reaching out to someone you trust.
Ed Note: I have omitted a small part of the content warning that is not relevant to this review.
If you are uncomfortable with these topics in the content of an interactive media experience, this may not be the review for you. I don’t intend to discuss every aspect of the aforementioned content in this review, but some of it will be discussed.
Cool. Elephant number one dealt with. Now let’s talk briefly about elephant number two.
Steam and Epic Store Bans
The reason I even heard of Horses at all—and the reason I decided to play it— was because the game has been banned off Steam and the Epic Store.
After playing the game, my verdict is probably something like this: the game is disturbing and contains material that is only appropriate for adults.
It is also less sexually explicit in many ways than other games I’ve played on Steam. Where it is explicit, it’s hard to imagine it being for the purpose of sexual gratification.
The game isn’t pornography.
Second elephant addressed. Let’s talk about the actual game.
Horses
The first thing that happened in Horses, after accepting a very lengthy trigger warning screen, was that I couldn’t move forward, used a rock to jump past an invisible wall, and immediately clipped out of bounds.
There’s no jump key, so my odds of getting back in bounds seemed slim.
After a bit, however, I manage to get back onto a track, and find myself face to face with the “horses” for the first time, chained together, and clipping through a fence.
This black and white film grain is present for the entire game. I didn’t find it interesting on any level.
I have to imagine this is not the intended experience.
It is still deeply uncomfortable.
After a few more minutes of failing to get back to the happy path, I started a new game.
Intermission 1
One of my favorite manga series of all time is Beastars. It has a horribly written ending, but 80% of the series or so is incredibly good. At least to me, it spoke accurately to some conflicted internal feelings I was having at the time.
These feelings were mostly around kink and sex. The version of sex education I got growing up was decent, but perhaps not all encompassing on some topics. I got what I’ll term as mechanically accurate information: “Use a condom. Vaginal sex gets you pregnant. Sex can feel really good. Get tested for STI’s. Make sure there’s consent.” It’s all well and good, but what it doesn’t do is give you any context for anything else.
For example, what if you enjoy inflicting pain? What if hurting people, something you’ve been told is wrong your entire life, sexually excites you?
In that case, what you need is someone to sit down and walk you through the general concepts of paraphilias, the nature of sexual development, the complexity of sexuality, and perhaps an overview of things like safe-words, the idea of “Safe, Sane, Consensual,” and other kink basics.
If you don’t get that, then you can very, very quickly end up hating yourself and seeing yourself as a future sexual predator who deserves to die. It is not a good place to be.
Beastars is the only piece of media that I’ve ever read that really felt like it captured that confused desire of wanting something that you hate yourself for wanting.
Of course, when I show the series to other people, they tend to bounce off it. That weird sense of relief—knowing that someone else has also felt this set of specific uncomfortable emotions—doesn’t exist for them.
Their life has had a set of difficult and complex challenges, but they didn’t have this one.
So Beastars doesn’t resonate.
Life Around The Farm
Horses is a fairly short game. It isn’t the most interactive game either. A large portion of the game is closest to a walking simulator. There are a few chores, but they’re incredibly simple, and consist of clicking the thing, clicking the other thing, and then clicking to put the first thing back. There’s also a single puzzle which I felt was quite poorly designed.
Instead, the game mostly consists of set pieces. Specifically, set pieces about being a farm hand on a farm with slaves.
Except… not quite.
The primary problem I have with Horses is the problem my friends had with Beastars: I don’t know what this game is trying to say.
Is it a statement about the treatment of farm animals? I don’t think so. We’re told explicitly by one NPC that everyone knows that the slaves in horse masks aren’t really horses. It’s never explained exactly what they are, but it’s implied that they’re social undesirables. In one case, we learn that a couple was caught having sex in the woods, and then turned into “horses.” They are absolutely human beings.
Well, maybe it’s a statement about slavery; about human chattel? I don’t think it’s that either. The horses in the story are only used for manual labor briefly, and only in a few instances. They seem to be mostly kept around simply as a way to deal with undesirables.
Additionally, its made very clear that the process of turning someone into a “horse” is at least a bit supernatural, which for me takes away from what should be the mundane horror of slavery. You don’t need science or magic to strip someone’s humanity.
There are also several elements of the presentation that are a bit too dreamlike for me believe this is the case.
Maybe it’s a game about the dangers of complicity to inhumanity? Except… it doesn’t feel like that either! I played through as a good little bootlicker, smiling enthusiastically at each assault and violation of human dignity I was present for, and I still got what felt like a “good ending” instead of perhaps, the bullet I my actions would have deserved.
On the other hand, it often felt like I was forced into the role of a bystander. There was no chance offered to degrade or uplift. No choice to become an enthusiastic participant in dehumanization, or to pick up the axe out back, and solve the problem I was confronted with quickly and efficiently.
In real life when I fail— when I don’t contribute to the solution of problems I claim to abhor—I’m at least left with a sense of quiet shame. I could donate the contents of my bank account to ACLU. I could spend more, and buy clothes that aren’t practically made by slaves. I could speak louder for the causes I say I care about. None of those would change the world, but at least I could try.
In Horses, that choice is made for me. There’s no ability turn the brand on the brander. Instead, I’m just a passenger as I sear flesh with initials. I’m a bystander for rape, castration and assault.
Intermission 2
I’m not really a horror person, be that games, movies, etc. I just don’t get it. I’ve had people explain to me that often in horror, the “monster” is just an already present danger made manifest, given fangs, a knife, or whatever else it needs to do its job.
I know I’m not a horror person, because I’m struggling to even think of an example to give. The only thing that comes to mind is the [REDACTED] in Jordan Peele’s movie “Nope” as a stand-in for the dangers of chasing wealth and fame at any cost.
Perhaps that all makes me very badly equipped to look at a piece of work like this.
One theme in Horses that I haven’t touched on at all is religion. I don’t quite know what to make of it.
It’s possible that this is what Horses is actually about, or at least intended to be about. Something about religious guilt; feeling forced to obey a specific upbringing or the nature of relationships. There’s a lot of what I would consider Christian symbology including something that feels like a crucifixion.
If Horses is about religion, it didn’t click or land for me.
Overall Thoughts
I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Horses. I don’t think it’s very good, or very bad. Just deeply disturbing, and a bit buggy.
I don’t recommend it.
“But!” I hear you saying. “You just wrote an incredibly long review of the game! Surely that means it had some impact on you, and that’s indicative of its success as a piece of interactive fiction!”
To which I respond: “Not really.” Horses is using a set of absolutely brutal themes and elements. F0rcing the player to witness sexual assault, human branding, slavery and suicide is going to provoke a reaction. A bad chef that tosses 50 pounds of jalapeno peppers into a dish is going to make something spicy, regardless of the quality of that final product.
If this game hadn’t been banned, I wouldn’t have bought it. At best, it’s a disturbing piece of media that plays out like a dreamy fugue state. At worst, it’s an agency-free walking simulator with no real statement.
Post-Script: I wrote this review last year, the day Horses came out, and at the time, decided against putting it up on the site. I was in the middle of promoting Card City Critters, and quite bluntly, Horses didn’t match the tone I wanted to have on the blog at the time.
I don’t think Horses is a very good game. It has minimal gameplay, I found the story to generally be dull, and in the weeks since I played it, I haven’t really thought about it at all. For a game built around shocking the player, it had very little impact on me personally. There are campfire stories that have greater staying power with me than Horses and its parade of human violation.
There are movies that show worse. There are books that show worse. Hell, there are plenty of games that show FAR worse. Horses is perhaps only novel in that it isn’t explicit pornography, and is coated in a black and white film grain. All games are art, but Horses isn’t a piece of art that’s worth your time.
