A lot has been said about this game, the gag gifting game on Steam. The game you gift to your frenemies. As someone with a special collection of "crappy kids games" mainly focusing on horse and vet games in particular, I had to know more. And this game is indeed a worthy addition of my crappy kids collection. Sometimes a crappy game can be fun. This is not one of those.

The game starts with a short story, but after that there is no tutorial. In the settings you can turn tutorial mode on, but it still doesn't tell you what to do. You need to click on things and then it says the same text over and over until you turn tutorial mode off. For review purposes I tried to do everything in the game. But I couldn't last long enough to have truly tried everything. The gameplay seems to be around training your magical horse and breeding it, then training the foal etc. It actually has some nice concepts. Not many horse games feature so many training options, including dressage, pulling a cart. The problem is that it is a nice idea, but not well executed. Every training is exactly the same. The entire training gameplay consists of watching a side scroller and you have to press the correct arrow at the right time, like a rhythm game. Which sounds more fun than it in reality is.

The game seems to feature collecting ingredients, but I haven't been able to explore how you come across them. There seems to be a little vet part in case your horse gets sick. You also need to groom your horse (running your mouse over the horse with the correct brush). There is a blacksmithing part. You can discover recipes for magical horseshoes and then make them. This again sounds more exciting than it in reality is. It is the same arrow minigame as in all the training. And discovering recipes just means slapping some money on it and it will tell you "it was found near a river with piranhas".

Then there is also racing and doing quests. I tried those but since I do not own the DLC, it will first ask you to buy the DLC. It also did that when I tried to quit playing, which I think is rather predatory especially for kids. If you don't have the DLC racing and questing simply means your horse will be gone for an irl amount of time, such as 1 minute and you are just staring at your screen.

It boasts that with the DLC you can race against other players online and there is even an achievement to overtake 40 competitors in a race. Somehow I can't imagine being able to find 40 other players to race with, but anyone can dream.