My Horse Prince - A Warning From History

Sometimes, fate guides you towards something you should never witness. If fate is a co-worker who sends you a game link and comments in amused astonishment that said game link even exists. This is why I found out about My Horse Prince. The fact I downloaded it onto my phone to investigate can only be blamed on me.

My Horse Prince is, essentially, a shameless cash grab. Stuffed full of microtransactions, it seeks to exploit a specific demographic in order for them to spend lots of money on consumable IAPs. What I can't quite figure out is who that demographic actually is.

Maybe some developers sat in the pub and went 'What do girls like? Well, they like cute boys, and they all love horses. I've got it! Combine the two, and we'll be quids in!' I've heard it's meant to be a parody; I'm not convinced.

I am, however, pretty certain they don't exactly understand what it means when little girls love horses.





Our heroine is not a twelve year old girl with big dreams as you might expect, but a grown woman with a proper job who laments that is has held her back from finding a husband, as she is stuck with middle aged balding salarymen. Rather than join Tinder or Bumble, she decides to go to a ranch because:

That's some interesting logic right there. Surprised that the ranch is full of grass rather than princes riding on horses, because apparently this is the 16th Century despite her modern-day twin-set, she sets about quizzing the placeholder art asset that got lost on its way to a WIP Animal Crossing clone.

*chortle* I'm sure they do, strange twin-set girl.

Our heroine with the magic fringe-phasing eyebrows isn't much interested in horses... until she meets one that changes her mind!

Yes, it's a horse with a human face. Not a centaur, a horse with a human face. I know I just said it's a horse with a human face, but I felt this was such an important point that it was worth mentioning twice. I also don't think her reaction is appropriate. Personally, I would have expected the exchange to go more along the lines of 'What the... there's a horse with a human face standing in front of me? Abomination! Kill it with fire!'

Putting my nitpicking hat on for a moment; why bother with the '(subjectively)'? We get it, most people don't get a boner for a horse. I'm not sure if the writer here is trying to be clever, or trying to deflect their own horsey interests.

Not to worry, apparently there's a perfectly rational explanation for this:

Oh, okay then. That totally makes sense. I for one am no longer questioning the logic of this game world. I do challenge WIP Animal Crossing Placeholder Asset to cite his sources, though.

The game doesn't hold back on the sexual tension, as our heroine struggles with her feelings and the enormity of the social taboos it breaks. If you squint at the text.

If you're reading this thinking how terrible I'm being for belittling a game trying to fulfil a highly specific niche of young girls and their horsey love, one look at the game loop will hopefully disavow you of any such notions.

The actual gameplay, and I use the term loosely, consists of tapping on the screen a whole lot. The vile experiment of a horse is hungry, so you need to feed him carrots until his happiness bar is full (at least, I think it's a happiness bar? This is never really explained). Tap on a carrot, he wanders over and eats the carrot. For some reason, consuming food causes him to run out of energy. When he has no energy, he finds it hard to eat carrots and gets far fewer happiness points... yeah, this is the part where you grind, and not in a sexy way.

That's what she said.

You can increase energy by engaging in conversation with Mr Ed's weird Hollywood cousin. This consists of providing multiple choice answers to some amazing conversation starters.

 

This is 'Fifty Shades of Grey' levels of sparky, charged dialogue, but the result is the same; the player has to choose one of three options. One is a 'bad' answer that makes your horsey paramour sad; so sad that he loses energy. One is a 'good' answer that perks his energy levels up a bit. One is the 'excellent' answer that perks him up the most. Not that there's any real logic to this; beyond saying whatever you think the horse wants to hear (which is a depressing thing to be teaching young girls, but that's a whole article in and of itself), there's not really any pattern to the 'correct' answers. Which I'm sure is in no way related to the risk of energy loss.

You only get a few chances to chat to Shadowfax's embarrassing brother. There's a cooldown period of 30 minutes, and after two conversation pieces, you are prompted to watch an advert in order to get another question. These adverts generally appear to be for better games than the one you are playing, so I hope the developers are getting a decent amount of revenue from this intrusive nonsense.

Just going to leave this here...

But wait! Just like in real life, there's a shortcut to avoid having to establish a relationship through dialogue and shared experiences - buy your way to love*! Just purchase a Golden Carrot and he can munch away without losing energy... for a short period of time. 

You keep doing this until your bar fills up, and the next chapter happens. What's your incentive? Epic dramatic moments such as this, because kabedon is better with horses?

For anyone questioning my name choice, when you next play Chrono Trigger, change Robot's name to 'Cock'. You will not be disappointed.

In case you're wondering if the gameplay escalates in difficulty, I'll save you the bother. It doesn't. This game loop will continue until you finish the game (I assume), or more likely, you get bored and stop playing.

Which is a shame, because you'll miss moments like this when they attempt to change up the 'tap to lose energy and fill up a random bar' mechanic:

Not only are you scratching your head as to why you have to make the horse run on a treadmill, the game itself even makes the joke, which I guess would be funny if the rest of the experience wasn't so dumb.

 

Even this obvious plea from the developers is unlikely to make anyone part with their cash to continue the game at a bearable pace, but it was worth a shot. You hear a lot about the difficulties of designing F2P games so they strike the balance of being fun, but just annoying enough to make you want to pay to speed up the gameplay; this doesn't even try. The gameplay, such as it is, is boring and inane. I waded through one more episode before I called it a day. 

I must admit, it was kind of worth it.

Yes, Champion the Blunder Horse is in your house making breakfast. Somehow. Don't think too hard about it. Don't think too hard about any of it, including why the horse is in your house in the first place.

Our plucky heroine is ready to tackle the crucial issues that have been keeping you up at night.

 

Oh, well that explains everything. Except... how does a horse wield a knife, you ask?

Like that, obviously. If you're wondering how the gameplay differs from the other two episodes of carrot-munching and treadmill-running, then you're charmingly naive. 

I could properly review this game, but I don't think I can do better than the game itself...

*There isn't, no matter what people on the internet say. Be wise, peeps.