The Legend of Horse Girl

Confession time: I recognize that there’s some real heft to the complaint, stated forcefully by A Single Ouroboros Scale and by many other games and folks too, that the IF community is too enamored of jokey puzzley medium-dry-goods parser games, and there’s more thematic, literary, and even systemic development happening in other parts of the scene. But – of course there was a but coming – I’d humbly submit that the proper level of enamor-ness for such things is definitely nonzero, because when I come across a game like The Legend of Horse Girl, part of my brain recognizes that this is all just USE OBJECT A ON BARRIER B stuff wrapped up in joke-a-minute delivery, but the rest of said brain is having enough fun not to care.

It helps that the setting here is a weird west that takes advantage of the familiar tropes to deliver some clever satire while also putting a distinctively gothic, genderpunk twist on proceedings. My notes file is filled up with little copy-and-pasted bon mots, from the way you go up against twin baddies, Butch McCreedy and his sibling Femme McCreedy, to the snake-oil salesman’s patter noting that his product is sovereign against ills including “juggler’s despair”, to the just-slipped-in-there detail that the bartender is “a tall slender woman with hands like enormous spiders.” The numerous characters are a joy to interact with, and while a simple TALK TO command gives you everything you need to know, they’ve got lots of additional fun dialogue if you try to ASK ABOUT different stuff. Add in a big-bad who’s got enough legally savvy to ensure his “can’t be killed by any man of woman born” deal-with-the-devil has a definitions clause to take care of women and non-binary people too, and you have a funny, self-aware game that kept me smiling through its one hour playtime.

The puzzles are also calculated to delight. There’s a reasonable degree of openness to explore the medium-sized setting and poke at the various puzzles, though they’re mostly arranged in a chain. At any point in time you’ll only have a few options for things to do and a modestly-sized inventory of one-use items, which means that the momentum generally stays high. Some of the challenges are reasonably familiar – you’ll need to gather three ingredients for a noxious, alcoholic brew in order to win a drinking contest, which makes for a straightforward scavenger hunt – while others are more esoteric (it’s heavily clued that you need a bezoar to win said contest, but the process for getting one is pretty obscure). While I did get stuck on that last puzzle, which I think did need better signposting, for the most part the game really nails the balance between being easy enough to allow for quick progress, but tricky enough that the player feels clever for figuring out what to do next.

The one thing holding LHG back is that it could use just a bit more tightening and bug-fixing. While I didn’t hit any game-breakers, there were enough things in need of polishing to make me hope for a post-festival release. Sometimes commands didn’t lead to any response, just spitting out a blank command prompt (LISTENing in the plaza, DRINK CACTUS); a significant weapon was missing a description, and some parser fussiness led to this who’s-on-first moment:

SAW BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?

SAW
What do you want to saw?

BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?

And one last nitpick: my Californian pride requires me to note that the town should probably be San Diablo, not Santa. But while these niggles made my playthrough a little rougher than I wanted it to be, they didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the heck out of this game – sure, it’s relatively straightforward IF, but there’s nothing plain-vanilla about Legend of Horse Girl.