Horse Master

Horse Master
by Tom McHenry profile

Surreal
2013

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Reviews and Ratings

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

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Number of Ratings: 87
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- RoboDragonn, November 9, 2015

- Edward Lacey (Oxford, England), October 29, 2015

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

The illusion of perfect happiness, July 29, 2015

by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

I don't know whether like is the right verb, but I certainly had a positive response to Horse Master. The game has imagination, especially when describing the central fiction of the horse and the process of mastering it; and it delivers it with good pacing. (Spoiler - click to show)From the very first scene it is obvious that these horses are strange; then the physical details start coming in and our mental image becomes more and more alien; and finally, at the great day, it turns out that all the preconceptions we still had about horse mastering were wrong as well. For it turns out -- and this is of course a brilliant thematic move -- that we are not trying to master any abilities that have to do with horses; we are trying to master the horse itself, to be its master, to dominate it to the point where it wont eat us and will let itself be killed. There is no achievement and no intrinsic worth to the procedure at all. There is only the prize conferred on us by a society that wants to witness a bizarre and gruesome spectacle.

The game poses, at least for a while, as a sort of time management game, although it quickly becomes apparent that the optimal strategy is also the simplest one. This raises the suspicion that the game is not about any kind of player skill. Then, when you get the hang of it, the game kicks you out of your house, and suddenly the time that was your resource becomes your greatest enemy, something to bridge and survive. That too was a neat trick. The fact that you can lose the game during this period does reveal a weakness, though: when one replays, one clicks through all the choices without reading or thinking. There's not enough variation in the game to support the kind of replaying that is demanded.

Other reviewers have pointed out that the piece is, at least on one level, about bodybuilding and/or animal shows, both activities where one is manipulating a body to conform with weird standards in order to gain praise and approvan of spectators. On an even more obvious level, the game is about the pains that someone will go through if they are desperate enough, and how a competitive system can create a kind of race to the bottom. But I guess that I'm actually most intrigued by the game's portrayal of the end goal of the endeavour: a state beyond all wanting, where one has transcended all cares. Horse Master is about people who are willing to give up everything because they believe in a reward that is so big that it equates happiness forever; and of course, some people do think that way about particular kinds of success. But, and the game makes this abundantly clear, that is an illusion. It is unreal. The whole bizarre fiction of Horse Master works, I think, precisely because the game wants to tell us that anything that is worth sacrificing everything for must be unreal.

The game may be a bit simple and repetitive when replayed; and the imagery is certainly a bit heavy-handed, both when describing the icky things happening to your body and the horse's body and, especially, when trying to set a political mood. But Horse Master is nevertheless impressive, because it manages to pack a lot of thematic into what is, after all, quite a small game. A great piece of choice-based fiction.

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- dutchmule, June 21, 2015

- thebloopatroopa, May 30, 2015

- chux, May 20, 2015

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Master of Horses, March 3, 2015

by Matt W (San Diego, CA)

There's a sense in which some creators of Twine games understand how prose works in a visceral way and are able to wield it like a scalpel, which is a tool that is normally used to very precise effect, but can easily be co-opted for wholesale, bloodsoaked mayhem. Horse Master is an exemplar of this. There's sense of metaphor-without-being-metaphor that sidles up to its subject matter by both directly addressing it, but distracting the reader. Its primary purpose is to evoke an emotional response, which it does very effectively by inserting disturbing twists in a very recognizable mirror universe. And it's very deliberate in how it presents choice and progression to the reader, using repetition and restriction to dial up the creeping sense of doom. This is a terse, expertly drawn piece of work. The best game about sports (and other things) ever made.