Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is an open-world equestrian game, developed by Aesir Interactive and Published by Microids, and it focuses on us, the main character, visiting Emerald Valley. We load into the game with a nice cutscene before playing a small tutorial showing the controls. After choosing a horse to ride throughout our save, with the choices being Dancer, Molly, and Quagga, we are greeted with another tutorial that shows us how to control the horse. I decided to go with Dancer, as who doesn’t like a cool name for a horse?

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch offers a nice open world, but it does feel empty with the limited number of NPCs. We first meet Gabriel who leads us to our ranch and offers to help us rebuild it when necessary. We also meet Matteo, the local farmer in Emerald Valley, and we can gather quests and information from him. Other characters give out quests, but that is really all they do. They add a tiny bit to the story, but with them mainly giving out quests, it feels like they’ve just there to fill the world. Once we do get to the Emerald Valley Ranch, we talk to our Aunt who previously took care of the property. She doesn’t believe the ranch is in ruins but tells us to fix it up anyway. She seemed to be focused on something entirely different, and it doesn’t seem like she was worried about the ranch whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the controls for Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch aren’t the best. It felt like the controls were bugged at some points during the game, with the response time for jumping taking a second or two to respond, usually leading to the horse crashing into the obstacle you’re trying to jump over. The camera also doesn’t follow along with the character very well, and we are forced to move it around to get a better perspective of things within the world, and whilst doing this, there are some moments where it freezes and takes a couple of seconds to catch up with us. You’ll need to learn the controls as they are because you can’t rebind them to make your experience any easier. Nonetheless, the controls are fairly comfortable to use, but they can take a good while to get the hang of them all.

The gameplay functionality is okay, but it could easily be improved. There were a few bugs and glitches here and there, with the most frustrating being an endless “death” loop, where my character and horse were somehow stuck in a pond, and each time I moved or jumped, I’d be shown a black screen before the character and horse appeared back in the same position, and this forced me to restart the game. The base-building elements of the game are interesting and you’re required to collect and rebuild most of your family’s ranch, but this allows for more exploration in the world.

The quests can also be a bit confusing, letting you think that you picked one up, only to realise you haven’t, so you need to go back and talk to the quest giver. I tend to get lost very easily in open-world games, and Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is no different. The World Map can be found in the pause menu, so if you’re lost, you can use this to find roads and houses, but it’d be simpler if there was a small map on the HUD while travelling. If you get really stuck, or you’re just feeling lazy, there is the option to “Reset to Estate,” and this will quite literally teleport you back to your Estate. During your adventures in the open world, you will be able to collect the recourses used to rebuild the ranch, with another feature of the base-building part of the game being that each time you complete a quest or discover something new, you will get a certain amount of “fame,” and this will allow you to build more buildings of a higher quality throughout the Ranch.

The graphics are pretty good for this type of game. The bushes, stones, and other things around the environment make it feel more real, but the character models could definitely use some more attention. There were times throughout the game when the character models would randomly become blurry and lacked the finer details. The horse models, on the other hand, seemed to be a little more stable, but there were still times that they’d suffer the blur effects.

The main focus seemed to be on the buildings around the ranch and other areas of the valley. They looked amazing, adding a much more rustic and realistic feel to the game, and I believe this was greatly needed. During cutscenes, the art style was beautiful; everything was vibrant, everything had sharp details and was in focus, and it made you feel like you were gearing up for another adventure, but this time, it was with horses!

Audio for Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is expectedly calm and soothing. It reminds you of the outside world with the birds chirping and the breeze rustling through leaves, and it brings you back to a time that you enjoyed. Aside from the background sounds, though, there wasn’t really any music during gameplay, and it only really came too during the few cutscenes you’ll enjoy. The dialogue was, unfortunately, not voice-acted, instead, it was displayed as text. It was easy enough to read, but it would have been even more immersive if there was some sort of voice acting. The characters did make a slight sound of acknowledgment whenever you’d talk to them though, and the horses had audio suited to whatever they were doing at the time, so if they were galloping, you hear the sound of their hooves slapping the ground.

I believe Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch could become a more enjoyable game if the controls were more responsive to your inputs, and it is in desperate need of hotfixes for the bugs and glitches that popped up more frequently than they should. For the average player, it can get difficult to play the game over longer sessions, so a little more variety in activities and quests wouldn’t go astray, but if you’re keen on the idea of exploring vast landscapes on horseback, and you’d like to give rebuilding a ranch a try, this one could be for you.

Written by: Mitchell Batchelor