My Horse: Bonded Spirits

I keep a mental spreadsheet of games that promise more systems than they actually ship, and My Horse: Bonded Spirits earns a row near the top. The pitch is genuinely appealing: play as a reluctant stud-farm heir in the village of Chestnut Glen, nurse a dilapidated farm back to life, build a trust-based bond with your horse through grooming, feeding and riding, and eventually compete in events using skills unlocked through that bond. That loop has real structural potential. The execution, unfortunately, chips away at it from multiple angles. The bond system itself is the game's most competent idea. Feeding your horse its preferred foods, petting it, and taking it out across the open fields of Chestnut Glen all push a trust meter that gates new riding gaits and competition skills. Think of it as a lightweight relationship RPG with a horse at the center. Riding progression moves through walk, trot, canter and sprint, though the in-game labels for these are inconsistent enough to confuse new players. The competition side asks you to unlock those gaits and then apply them in timed races or obstacle runs, which provides a short-term goal structure that keeps early hours moving. There is also a stud farm management layer, a separate budget from your personal funds, hired workers who vanish into the background after onboarding, and cosmetic renovations for the stable that amount to swapping wall textures. If you arrived hoping for anything resembling Stardew Valley-depth farm management, that layer will disappoint sharply. Technically, this is where the spreadsheet gets ugly. The camera on area transitions can whip violently, which is a genuine motion-sickness risk the developer has acknowledged but not fully resolved. Controls are oversensitive on turning and sluggish on speed changes, making precision riding in competition courses more frustrating than satisfying. Player-character animations read as stiff against the noticeably better horse animations. There are persistent bugs: horses registering as malnourished despite full feed stats, collision errors that trap horses in stalls, side quests involving collectible plush figures and chicken herding that simply do not function for a portion of players. The Steam community review score sits in mostly-negative territory, and the consistent theme across player reports is that the game shipped feeling closer to a late Early Access build than a finished release. Who does it actually work for? Players with genuine horse-girl nostalgia, low tolerance for complexity, and patience for jank will find short-term warmth here. The open-world riding, when the camera cooperates, captures a casual gallop-across-fields appeal that a few other horse games also miss. The dialogue system has snarky NPC responses to player choices that land as a minor surprise given the genre. A free prologue exists on Steam, and testing it first is the most rational move before spending anything on the full version. There is no mod ecosystem, no AI depth worth discussing, and the decision-making layer is thin enough that this sits closer to a casual life-sim than anything a sim-specialist would ordinarily track. The ceiling is visible from the tutorial. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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