The Ranch of Rivershine

The Ranch of Rivershine is a game where you move to a small town and become an upstanding pillar of the community. Here, you were originally hired as a simple ranch hand to work for the new horse rider at Rivershine, but the rider never showed up. So you now get to live on the ranch instead as the new potential champion. Rivershine is a town in decline and they need a champion horse racer to draw in tourists and other businesses. So it is up to you to train and raise horses and bring in that tourism business.

The Ranch of Rivershine is a comfy horse raising game. Find it on Steam.

The game is charming and comfy. You get a nice ranch to raise horses and you need to slowly buy upgrades to make everything better. You can build bigger stables to train more horses at once. Aside from that, there is a rudimentary farming system as well as raising some other animals for their resources such as chickens for eggs. The other things are mostly there and don’t take much thought, but that’s fine since the main focus is on the horses.

The town of Rivershine looks like a fun western or frontier-inspired place. The time period is ambiguous since there doesn’t seem to be any technology more modern than electricity. This is a horse town, so everyone gets around by horses. However, there are more modern clothing like hoodies or sneakers.

There are only six people living in town, and it is pretty easy to get your friendship levels up with them. I was done with most of them before the end of the first season. There are a few more townspeople living in other areas, but they are also simple to befriend. Simply speak to them once a day and you’ll slowly get to learn more about them. They are endearing folk, though.

Since the focus of the game is on horses, how is that aspect? Horses can be trained in four different stats: Speed, Endurance, Jump, and Flexibility. Most training can be done simply by riding them around, though you need to buy obstacles to train jump. From there, you can enter your horses in time trials, which are the primary way to make money. Performing jumps is as simple as pressing the jump button when the obstacle indicator turns green. The more advanced time trials do get decently challenging, though you can always train your horse more to do better. There is no actual racing of the horses, so don’t expect that.

You can get horses either by buying them from the auctions or by capturing wild horses. You can also breed two horses you have together. Horse breeding can get pretty involved if you want to try for rare coat patterns or getting the right mix of traits on your horse.

While you as the player get some customization, the horses get loads. You can buy all sorts of gear from bridals to leg warmers for your horses. You can also learn different tail and mane styles to get them looking spiffy. Horses also have all different kinds of coat colors, so you can get some pretty great looking horses.

The big shame with the game is the horse physics, in that they are pretty much non-existent. Horses don’t feel like they have any weight to them. The main difference between the way you control and the way horses control are that horses auto move and they have a larger turning radius. But it doesn’t feel like they are thousand pound animals that need time to prepare for any movements. I think part of the problem is that the horses are too responsive. It doesn’t feel like you are controlling the rider controlling the horse. Rather, the horse reacts directly to your input.

The game also does not support controllers despite everything seemingly being perfect for it. The keyboard and mouse controls are fine, though. You can choose to either use the keyboard or the mouse to steer the horse, but you can’t change which one within the game. You need to pause and go into a menu to do that. Also, you can’t interact with things while on your horse despite a few things that would make sense to interact with while on the horse. So you will have to ride up to something and dismount to do anything.

Aside from raising horses and racing them, you can simply take them out to various locations around town. The locations don’t connect to each other, so getting between them can feel tedious before you unlock fast travel. The various locations are fun and have different feels. From the forest to the lake, you can stroll around picking flowers or finding some hidden treasures. They are fine trails to take a morning canter or an evening gallop. 

The Ranch of Rivershine is a cozy horse-raising game, but it can feel simple. For people that don’t want a challenge, this game will be fine to relax in. The horse physics are what let me down in the game.

Find it on Steam.