Star Stable’s horse care consists of dragging an item from your inventory onto your horse. While the arguments of Frequency, Reward and Satisfaction are more important in order to make horse care games worthwhile, Star Stable Online proves that brevity can be an asset in itself: I see three main culprits for this annoyance and the general lack of fun I find in horse care mechanics: Duration, frequency and lack of satisfaction. In games like Ostwind/Windstorm and My Riding Stables: Life With Horses (especially the 2018 version), realizing it was time to groom my horse again was usually an occasion to groan in annoyance.

Many of the horse care mechanics I’ve tried grow boring almost immediately - or at the latest grow boring once you’ve completed them two or three times. Unfortunately, many of these horse care minigames quickly grow tedious or even frustrating: let’s take a look at why that is, what developers could do differently, and whether or not horse care mechanics are even necessary to begin with.

Others include feeding, combing mane or tail, or petting the horse regularly to fill some sort of trust or love meter. Most horse-focused games feature brushing your horse and picking its hooves. If you’ve ever played a horse game - meaning a game which does not just feature horses as a means of transport, but actually puts its focus on horse ownership and riding - you’ll likely have seen an image very much like the above: A hoof-picking minigame where you click or drag your cursor around on a dirty horse hoof until some hoof cleanliness bar is full.

Online horse game taking care