Horse Girl [ashcan]

Gave this a shot on a recommendation from an online friend. Spent about five hours playing, ending with a full journal and a body covered in lines.
Fourth king arrived only one card short of what would have been self-realization and escape. Flipping over that card hit me like the end of 1984.
And then I still needed to write what happened.
You've got a hell of a story here. Definitely not for everyone, but thanks for making it.

Played this while ago and loved it! Just preordered the physical edition :)

I'm really sad I missed out on this. I backed the game on Kickstarter, but it says the PDF won't be available until August. Is there a way I can get it to read ahead of its official Kickstarter release?

Oh my god the whole description has broken for me but I am back to ask how you feel about games inspired by yours?

 Horse Girl, a Review

Horse Girl is what it says on the tin – it’s incredibly and deeply fucked up. It isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a journaling solo RP about a young woman who gets progressively transformed into a horse by her abusive lover.

I would like to note that the “bestiality” in question in the trigger warnings involves no animals, only the player character – a human being transformed physically into an approximation of a horse who all the while appears to maintain human intelligence and reasoning. The abuser may very well meant to be a zoophile, but no real horses are harmed, only the player character.

There is a prompt that references significant morphine use in context of after a procedure, which some may want to be aware of before playing as it's really the only potential trigger that wasn't mentioned.

I cannot emphasize enough how fucked up this RP is. Don’t get me wrong, though. That’s not a complaint, that’s a compliment.

It manages to be extremely grotesque without ever feeling unnecessary for the message. It crosses lines of taste without ever feeling like it truly went over the top. Abuse, after all, in all its forms is extremely grotesque. Abuse, by its nature, crosses every line of taste.

I should note here, before I go further into the review, that I’m an abuse survivor myself.

I didn’t have a Jenga tower, so I used the count down method. This ended with a fairly long game of 14 Months and most of my deck gone through.

I didn’t have a normal deck, so I used my tarot deck. I removed the Major Arcana and Pages (substituting Knights for Jack). I assigned each suit to their playing card equivalent, so Cups were Hearts, Coins/Pentacles were Diamonds, Rods/Wands were Clubs, and Blades/Swords were Spades.

I didn’t write on my body, but rather mentally noted the markings. I otherwise did the playthrough cleanly, without having read more of the contents than necessary to do what I was meant to. After I was done my playthrough, I read the remaining parts of the PDF.

I’m not sure how intentional the suit designation for the card draws were, but I was impressed with how well the prompts matched the (tarot) meanings for the suits – Cups being the emotions (especially love) suit, Coins for stability, home, and material advantages; Rods for thoughts and ideas; and blades for conflict and… in the game, some literal surgical blades!

While the Spades prompts were the most visceral (my heart started sinking whenever I saw a Blade card pop up because I knew whatever I was about to read was going to be some new fresh hell), they actually weren’t the most disturbing prompts, personally. I found the Hearts prompts most distressing because of the particular style they were written. They express an undying love even while detailing what should be obvious to the reader as clearly abuse. But it isn’t necessarily known to the character, or perhaps the character is in denial depending on the player’s interpretation and phase of the game when they draw it.

The stylistic choice of always capitalizing the lover/abuser’s pronouns, as if He were a god-figure is impactful to the play. It brings home how all-consuming the desire to please this new center of her world is, to make sure He is happy, even to her detriment, even as every last piece of who she was is warped to be completely unrecognizable.

This game is a horror story, but more than that, it’s a tragedy. It’s a loss of self. Every little piece of yourself that you mark is one of the obvious pieces that gets lost in the process. But the game notes that the transformation is both mental and physical. The mental loss is more subtle. It’s harder to see it building up. You don’t mark it on your body, but it can cause the game to end.

Like abuse, it comes in spurts. The mental loss comes when you may least expect it. There are times, and in my game there was well over a month straight of not receiving any of this kind of loss. The game kept on and the horrors kept progressing because the abuser seemed like He was being nice then. This mechanic is an example of phenomenal game design. I wish I had a Jenga set to play it with because the risk of knocking over a teetering tower would add another layer of tension present in this kind of relationship – that constant walking on eggshells feeling. Some of the cards make a little less sense on the surface when they get drawn in the narrative after certain other cards. This isn’t a flaw per se, as they’ll still fit in the end, but may require a bit more thought in your journaling process.

I nearly had my character escape, I was very close but kept rolling too low to remove escape tokens, even with three visible Aces, I kept experiencing setbacks in my playthrough. The odds of escape are very much stacked against you once you’re stuck there. I had a plan, at first very subtle but as time passed and the horrors increased, my steps increased in desperation and brutality in equal measure.

The game isn’t clear whether the abuser is catching onto the player character’s escape ideas or attempts or is simply jealous and paranoid of the player character leaving him. This distinction, to the extent it even matters (as the results are more or less the same either way) is up to the player to decide in their journaling activities.

I most appreciated the questions at the end. Without them, this would have been a well-written psychological horror journalling RP about an abusive relationship and still worth trying. With the cooldown questions at the end, it really puts a spotlight on how much the writer cared about the subject matter and the readers.

I’ve written and engaged in very intense horror LARP before, and we did something similar there. We all had a cooldown period together where we got out of character and reflected on the experience. The questions at the end of Horse Girl are like that but in written form, and for a single person. They helps you pull back to the real world and analyze the character you just played to see her with a new understanding before releasing her.

I was briefly concerned as a trans person before playing there might have been some unintentional transphobic leanings in the allegories – specifically looking into the concept of doctor coercing an entire species(?) change on his partner. I walked away not feeling that way at all. I also didn’t feel any specifically trans coding in any of the abuse. It simply felt like a more visceral version of abuses heaped on domestic violence victims that aren’t necessarily that blatant normally.

Though, it is worth noting that one of the specific and personal body-horror ways a trans person may experience abuse in a relationship is by the abuser coercing them out of or otherwise preventing them from accessing transition. There’s a similarity to the player character’s plight in that there’s coercion involved, there’s feelings of conforming to a body that doesn’t necessarily feel right to you to make your partner happy, and the lack of access to care can be excruciatingly painful. But again, I don’t really think this is a trans allegory or a story about transphobic abuser. It could be in your personal play-through, but that would be an additional detail you chose to add on your own.

I would recommend this game to anyone who thinks they can stomach the contents within, particularly if they are fans of body horror and psychological horror. If you find catharsis through horror games, be mindful going in how low the odds of successful escape are and the experience may be what you’re looking for. It’s a highly intense experience. You may need one or several breaks throughout.

Any plans to add new community copies?