My Horse: Bonded Spirits review for PC

I don’t hate My Horse: Bonded Spirits – and that, quite frankly, is shocking.

Admittedly, this is an example of low expectations working in a game’s favour. I went into My Horse: Bonded Spirits expecting nothing out of it – less than nothing, if that’s possible, since the game’s publisher has a pretty lousy track record. I was sure that this would be more of the same.

And while I wouldn’t say that My Horse: Bonded Spirits is great or anything, I would say that, compared to the other games from this publisher, it’s surprisingly decent. At the very least, it’s certainly deeper and more interesting than I was expecting. While it’s a job simulator of sorts, rather than just having you do the same mindless tasks over and over again, here you at least have a story (your character is poised to inherit a stud farm, and she needs to prove she’s up to the job) with other characters that you interact with and lots and lots of tasks to balance.

To be sure, none of the characters are all that deep – they basically exist to wait around for you to call them, or to call you with a job. And the tasks aren’t that challenging either – there’s a lot of them, so it’s sort of like the developer decided to throw together a bunch of different job simulators into one.

But My Horse: Bonded Spirits shines because, as the title implies, you need to bond with your house. You feed it (figuring out what foods it likes most), and pet it, and clean it, and none of these tasks are so onerous or mind-numbing that you hate doing it. Best of all, you build affinity with your horse by taking it out for rides, and this is where the game genuinely shines – you have plenty of opportunities to take the horse out in wide open fields, and you can just run around enjoying the scenery. I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest horseback experience in gaming or anything, but it’s still pretty fun.

And that’s what makes My Horse: Bonded Spirits a cut above its publisher’s usual fare. While no one would confuse it for a GOTY contender or anything, it’s still a solid riding simulator with a decent amount of content. Given how bad it could’ve been, that seems like a win.

PlayWay provided us with a My Horse: Bonded Spirits PC code for review purposes.