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Number of Ratings: 87
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Previous | << 1 2 3 4 >> | Next | Show All - Laura Michet (Los Angeles), November 15, 2013
- Christina Nordlander, October 17, 2013
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), September 13, 2013
- Artran (Taipei, Taiwan), September 5, 2013
16 of
16 people found the following review helpful:
Flogging a Live Horse, July 16, 2013by Jim Kaplan (Jim Kaplan has a room called the location. The location of Jim Kaplan is variable.)Related reviews: tom mchenry Play it if: you want to read a story you can admire, a short, brutal punch of a game that'll stick in your mind for a long time to come.
Don't play it if: you're out of room in your heart for bleak truths.
How sarcastic I must seem, using such grim terms about a game that advertises itself so lightly.
To be honest, it took me about three playthroughs of Horse Master to really grasp what I felt about it. On the one hand it's a tragedy of desperate ambition, but at the same time it's a snigger-inducing parade of the absurd and the grotesque. Half the time I felt like I was being asked to laugh and cry at the same time, so I ended up doing neither and instead just feeling emotionally mangled.
The story is on the surface that of a person rearing and training a horse for a prestigious competition. The immediate twist is that the "horse" in this case is not really a "horse" as we know it, but appears to be some sort of mammoth crustacean grown from a larval stage. Much of the sheer oddness of the game is derived from the contrast between the glowing, admiring terms in which the horses are described and the true details of their appearance, which are left a little vague but sound anything but noble or graceful to the common reader.
Of course the more important twist is that it's not really a fun, quirky horse-raising sim at all. That's just the foot in the door.
Bodybuilding.
Say what you will in its defense, but to the uninitiated it's not so different. To achieve competitive success as a bodybuilder, a person has to exercise, diet, gorge, dehydrate, medicate, and groom themselves obsessively to warp their bodies into extreme forms. They risk and experience poverty, ridicule, and failure in turning themselves into something that is ultimately decorative. They don't perform astounding feats of strength or agility. They pose.
Speaking purely as an outsider, there's something terribly tragic to that sort of lifestyle, or at least to the way it's seen by much of the world. That men and women can invest so much of themselves into an endeavor which is so often thankless.
As odd a decision it might seem to have the horses not be mammalian, I think there was a purpose to it, and that purpose was to emphasize just how un-beautiful this sort of thing can really be. Some types of dog shows maintain frankly arbitrary and ridiculous standards for their competitors. To me, weirdo that I am, breeding creatures for their aesthetic value to humans is something deeply disturbing and abhorrent - but their aesthetic value often inoculates us to the ethical concerns. In Horse Master, we don't have that illusion. The creatures being bred and displayed are not the kinds of things that inspire joy and awe in the minds of My Little Pony fans.
It's a value dissonance of the kind present in the assassination-training scene of howling dogs, though here its purpose is much clearer: to make us reconsider our questionable relationships with the animals who inhabit our lives.
(Spoiler - click to show)I think it's somehow fitting that the ending will always destroy someone in the balance. Either the player loses everything and has no future outside of poverty and obscurity, or the horse dies in an exploitative, orgiastic display. Either the player character is crushed by a world which does not really care about her existence, or the horse is slaughtered by a system and a protagonist who does not really care about its wellbeing. You're a bodybuilder, or you're a dog breeder. The perpetrator or the victim.
It's not very uplifting. But it is compelling in its own way. And it sort of gives you pause for thought, doesn't it?
- Molly (USA), July 14, 2013
- george (Seattle), July 13, 2013
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Well-written, Weird, and Barbaric, July 13, 2013This story succeeds as an example of otherworld dystopian Science Fiction. Horses are not horses, but weird creatures with a carapace and tentacles. The protagonist is obsessive to the point of self-ruin to win what comes off as a parody of animal-judging competitions. You groom your horse as you like, enter the competition, and win (or lose I suppose - I did not play a second time). A neat read, but I'm not sure I care to play again and do things wrong to lose...as I'm not sure I could make the story turn out better.
- Ghalev (Northern Appalachia, United States), July 13, 2013
- E.K., July 13, 2013
8 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
Hunger Games meets Black Beauty on crystal meth, July 12, 2013I haven't written any reviews on IFDB but I feel compelled to with Horse Master: heartwrenching, sharply written and even though I'm not sure it is truly strategically rigorous, it FEELS that way (in that interestingly I was feeling shades of Cryptozookeeper). But the decisions you make for caring for your horse are seamlessly integrated into a setting that is scary and absurd. It's a world where (Spoiler - click to show)sacrificing your horse at the end is expected as the way to win, a decision which shocked me and yet felt utterly natural with the narration. In this sense the narration felt "unreliable"--surely there would have been an emotional bond? But, no. We see in a rush just how much the character has integrated the cruel violence of his world. Like any good science fiction, Horse Master takes common terms (like "horse") and reorients our perspectives on them.
In a way, this could be seen as a dark, postmodern take on the "pony book genre": books of a young person growing close with a special horse. "A perfect friendship with an idealized companion." But in Horse Master, through the interaction (and the implementation with Twine was incredibly solid), the player herself or himself rips away this sentimentality. Clicking through, the player is exposed to the desperation of the world of the Horse Master, deeper and deeper, until...well, you have to find out for yourself. Highly, highly recommended.
10 of
10 people found the following review helpful:
Impeccable construction. Phenomenal debut. , July 12, 2013HORSE MASTER is a game executed to perfection.
Let me explain.
FILM CRIT HULK recently wrote an article talking about the current trend towards narrative convolution in summer blockbuster movies. As a champion of classically-told stories, he keeps bringing up the point that a work of entertainment doesn't have to be mysterious or epiphany-inducing to be successful, even enduring. Rather, it should be well-constructed, or, in his words, "functional." He says:
"YOU MAY LAUGH AT THAT WORD 'FUNCTIONAL,' BUT TO HULK IT'S ONE OF THE BEST WORDS IN ALL OF MOVIEDOM. IT MEANS THE FILM WORKS DAMMIT. IT MEANS IT IS ENGINEERED PROPERLY AND DOES EXACTLY WHAT IT SETS OUT TO DO."
I've come to the conclusion that HORSE MASTER is an excellent example of this concept.
I'm having a hard time expressing this, but here goes: Every aspect of HORSE MASTER is constructed with thoughtfulness and quality. These solidly executed bits then all come together to form a deeply satisfying experience.
For example, take the main display menu: in visual novels, the choice menus are there because you need a place to make your choice. They're well-organized and easy to read, and that's about as far as they go.
In HORSE MASTER, the display menu does some HEAVY narrative lifting. Through this little viewport, you get to see the squalor your character is surrounded by. Seeing it, you *get* why you're making the sacrifices and taking the risks that you are. You GET why this character wants this horse to succeed.
That viewport sits atop a menu that exemplifies the low-grade anxiety that builds when you have too many choices and not enough time to pick them all.
These things are then yoked together by terse narration which clearly defines the character's desires and attitudes even as it spouts bizarre, Porpentinesque jargon.
Before I played HORSE MASTER, I thought I was in for a freakpunky Western CYOA, like if Anna Anthropy's CALAMITY ANNIE and Porpentine's CYBERQUEEN had a baby. The game I got had those flavors, yes, but it's a different beast altogether.
HORSE MASTER is not a deep art game. But I don't want it to be: the deliberate choices of its author let me access the humanity at the core of this story--and as a result I had a really wonderful experience.
I salute the author and look forward to more from him!
* * *
(Fellow players, I must know what ending you got. (Spoiler - click to show)Because my ending crushed me. I was *so* close. And whatever went wrong, I have no idea how I could fix it the next time. IS there even a good ending??)
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