Recent reviews by A Good Dog

This game actually really appeals to me as a virtual pet training roguelite visual novel life sim. There is honestly a surprising amount of content and detail in this game. You start roguelite runs by constructing a small deck of support cards which contrtibute to the pool of visual novel life sim-esque events that can occur during the career. The careers involve some light friendship mechanics with your support cards that can alter and enhance the way you train or race with bonuses to stats and "hints" for skills that can then be unlocked. Each horse has her own set of goals in the career, along with her own set of trainee events that tell a short little story that reveals more about your horse's personality, motivations, and struggles. As long as you keep meeting her goals, you continue on training and competing in races until you finish the career. Once you do, you can then use the trained horsegirl in other modes such as daily races against NPCs and automated races against other player's racing teams. Each horse also has 8 chapters of fully voice acted cut scenes that provide rewards when watched and provide a little more depth into the horses' life or past. When you win a race, you unlock an "idol concert" featuring the winners and participants of that race. Each horse girl has her own vocal tracks for the concerts, meaning the lead singer and back up singers combine their tracks for a performance tailored to the results of your specific race. There are a handful of songs and I think it's a really fun way to actually celebrate YOUR wins.

I've really just been enjoying playing through and getting to see all the events the game has to offer while getting to know all the horses and explore their relationships with you as their trainer and the other girls as fellow umamusume and I've been able to do that without spending a single cent for 50 hours so far.

Can be a dog. 10/10

Brilliant level design and a compelling setting make this an exceptional survival crafting game.

I might be the only person in the world who bought this for the fact Aestri is a female elf survivor using the male skeleton and animations.

It's like someone finally made a horse GAME instead of a horse simulator. Everything feels fun with a ton of quality of life features that make "horse chores" NOT feel like a chore!

I'd honestly compare it most to a Slime Rancher that is focused on horse raising and riding instead of gathering slimes and farming plorts. There is farming, you can grow food, treats, etc that you can feed to your horses for basic needs and for extra bonuses. You can buy seeds or find them, in addition to raw wild materials (crops, bedding) in the several environmentally distinct open-world areas like in Slime Rancher, including your ranch and the town.

You can ride your horse pretty much anywhere, including inside people's houses! Instead of your CHARACTER having energy, each HORSE has its own energy. You can use the energy to progress with them. You can train them to increase one of 4 stats that help in races (speed, dash, turning, and jump). You can train them in arenas or on courses, but you also can just train them in the open world areas while foraging materials if you want to. You also participate in racing competitions that award money based on how you place, which each use a chunk of the energy bar, and seem to progress the story. When your horse runs out of energy, if you have another you can go swap horses and keep racing or training. When you spend time and win competitions with your horse, its trust in you increases and it unlocks different features like being able to whistle to call your horse from farther and farther distances and to mount it from behind. Horses will wander around if not hitched to a post (which is very easy and smooth to do), but the more your horse trusts you the closer to you it will stay, sometimes even following you. It's a small thing that I don't find to be very annoying but makes the game feel a lot more immersive and like your horse is their own being.

There are tons of horse coat patterns, colors, and modifiers that can be passed down to foals utilizing the breeding mechanics. You can eventually capture and tame wild horses with unique coat colors and patterns to breed into your herds. The method of adopting wild horses is incredible. You herd wild horses to a wild horse pen you purchase, and gradually gain trust with the wild horse. It will let you pet its head and it will reveal some more information about it. Then you can pet both its sides to reveal its gender and coat details, and finally you can approach its rump (the most defensive part of a horse!) to learn its skill levels. After you gain the wild horses' trust, you can choose to adopt it and it will be sent to an open stable. Oh yeah, did I mention certain genes and coat colors are native to certain areas? This might be my favorite part of the game so far.

The controls can feel wonky and take some getting used to, but I think it's intended to make you feel like you're controlling a horse. It reminds me of RDR2 but more responsive, and training flexibility can make it feel a bit better. I think it's really worth a try if you are at all interested in it, it's a surprisingly immersive and in-depth horse raising game that feels like a very complete experience, even in its current Early Access state. I can't wait for more updates!

After some more time playing, I wanted to touch on a few negatives or annoyances that might be dealbreakers for people. I still can't get enough of the game, but these are things I think should be mentioned

There are 2 control schemes: mouse controls the camera which controls the direction of your horse, and "free camera" where you use WASD to control the horse and mouse to control the camera direction. There doesn't seem to be a way to use WASD with a following camera and it can be difficult juggling the camera's position and your horse's direction with at the same time. Additionally, free camera can be disorienting at times, I mostly notice it when I'm dismounting my horse with free camera and the camera snaps to follow my character.

The resources out in the field can be hard to notice. The white sparkles that are supposed to denote them aren't very visible from afar, and I often find resources that aren't even sparkling (hopefully due to a bug). The design of resources in an area tends to be very similar to the surrounding environmental decoration, so picking them out of the foliage can be really difficult, if not impossible (some fruits/treats are so small they are just hidden by the height of the grass, for instance). I actually turned the graphics down to "Fast" when foraging because it's SO much easier to see resources out in the world without the grass.

There is a bug where sometimes your horse won't jump an obstacle even if you press the button at the right time; this seems to happen most often on bridges, for some reason.

There is also currently a bug where if you retire a horse to the retirement pasture (essentially a "non-active horse storage" that you can store and retrieve horses from as long as you have an open stall) with a dapple coat, it will lose its dapples permanently!

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/781

WASD Character Movement mod makes an incredible game perfect. If you find yourself enjoying the game but struggling with the movement and control scheme, please check this mod out!

Whenever I'm not playing this game, I'm thinking about playing this game

An improvement in nearly every way to an already amazing franchise. Persona 5 Royal takes nearly everything that annoyed or bothered me in P4:G and makes it better, more fun, and more dynamic. So many quality of life improvements and the UI is incredibly stylish with a ton of personality while still being easy to use and understand. I can't get enough of this game!

nearly 100 hours later and I love this game more than life itself

Can you pet the monstie?

Yes. You can pet ALL THE MONSTIES!

and it heals them and builds kinship <3

Kanji romance plz