Horse Whisperer

Assigning a star rating to this game was tough. As others have pointed out, this game is very very incomplete. The description mentioned that an update should be out on the first of september, but about four weeks later, this game still resembles a construction site.

I had a pretty hard time reaching the end of the seven day work period in the game, as there were a good number of dead ends when I tried interacting with the horses. By that, I mean just reaching a point where there were no options to proceed. There were also plenty of times where I saw a "Coming soon, sorry" message, along with other strange and buggy messages.

Even when I did find a set of options which took me to the end, the whole thing was still bugged out. A horse which I killed earlier participated in the race with seemingly no problems. At that point, I wondered if it was even worth the bother.

That said, the concept is pretty interesting, and the writing, while rough in some spots, was entertaining and humorous. Talking with horses, trying to push their buttons all while fulfilling your goal - that had the makings of a great game. If this game was complete, it could have been fantastic, but as of now, it's largely a construction site.

Giving this three stars was a tough choice. It is simply way too unfinished to be an IFcomp entry. That said, before calling up the nearby glue factory, I'll probably also add that this game could be really good in a completed state.

This is an unfinished Twine game about you, a horse whisperer that now works for the mob. You have to talk to three horses and get them to finish a race in the order that the mob has told you to do.

You have about a week to do that, and can talk to one (or sometimes more) horses a day, then you race.

Each horse has its own dialogue tree. These aren't, in general, finished, and the end of the race screen I played had a broken else statement in Twine (which I reported as the game asked).

What text there is is mostly jokes about the wild lives the horses live and silly dialog options you are allowed to say. Some of the content might be described as crude but mostly harmless. I enjoyed some of the banter with the snobby horse.

Like a couple other games this competition, this game would have benefitted from more prep time, and especially if it had been finished before the competition began.

After more than 30 years, the Comp has accumulated a body of folk wisdom, tips and tricks, and helpful pointers about how authors can best position their work for a successful reception. Sadly, this store of knowledge is built atop the broken debris of promising games that demonstrated what not to do, and sadder still, Horse Whisperer, which boasts an engagingly oddball premise (you’re a horse psychologist trying to fix a race for the mob) and more than its share of solid gags, must join this host of fallen exemplars, offering an illustration of the lesson that if the phrase “untested alpha build” appears anywhere in your game or blurb in a non-diegetic context, you should withdraw and resubmit next year (or to Spring Thing! There’s always Spring Thing!)

It would feel mean to catalogue all the errors I ran into trying to play Horse Whisperer, but there are a lot and they’re obvious – none more so than the dialogue options currently marked with asterisks, which when you click them take you to a “sorry, coming soon” passage. The logic linking the results of your actions to an ending appears either broken or absent, since the outcome of the race ignored that I’d psyched up one horse, demoralized another, and disqualified a third (the disqualified horse came in second place). Oh, and the race happened a day after it was supposed to.

Again, this is a shame, since this dark, absurdist take on Mr. Ed has some comedic potential that’s occasionally well-realized, and the author clearly has a lot of fun ideas for how to elaborate on the premise. But it’s not spitting-distance to done, even for a horse. Hopefully in addition to being a warning sign to others on the dangers of submitting an incomplete game to the Comp, Horse Whisperer will also be fodder for the author to come back next year (or again, this coming spring!) with something that lives up to the promise that’s on display here. Until then, the game isn’t stable enough to… be able to make much hay? These horse puns are harder than they look!