Pferd & Pony – Best Friends - Mein Pferd

Summary
The game is all about simulating you owning a horse. You start with a foal, which you have to take care of and can show in beauty pageants. Eventually it will grow up if your wrists survive that long.

Game Design
This game takes the simulation thing very seriously. In the stable you just have to run around and pick up items and directly use them on the horse that is standing there, no real minigame mechanics and no progress bars for the horse care or anything. You just see trends on the stats bars that will stop going in the right direction when whatever you are doing is no longer useful. Unfortunately, the dedication to this simulation thing did not extend to visible dirt that gets reduced or anything fancy like that. It also takes a looong time to get the cleanliness up. Bonus points for real time brushing? Except in real life, you'd get to cuddle an actual horse while doing it and the motions would be not just putting all the strain on your wrist and mouse fingers. Better get a good mouse, cause you're gonna press that mouse button and drag forever.

Character Creation
First of all, you get to customize your character (pick between boy and girl) and horse. There are a few different colour options, a choice between draft, warmblood and thoroughbred (influences stats) and a choice between mare and stallion.

Afterwards, you get to fill in a character sheet about your horse, which is a fun idea for getting your mind into roleplaying and making up a headcanon for your horse. You'll need it to get invested, trust me. The only sad part about it is that there is a rather small character limit for the individual fields, so you need to formulate the biggest achievement of your horse quite concisely. No room for a long story here, you can write that down on paper later. Maybe while you are brushing your horse, if you are sufficiently ambidextrously inclined. You'll have plenty of time. The manual claims that if you don't fill in the character sheet, something will be filled for you, but I only read that after I had started playing, so I don't know what it will put.

In the stable
You are then dropped into the stable, where your foal is waiting for you. Or rather your foal is dropped in the stable, inside the stable you are just a disembodied hand. You are left to look around and click on things, tutorial boxes will pop up for items you pick up, but there is no story in this game or a tutorial in the sense of telling you what to do. Told ya you'd need the headcanon. You move around by pointing the disembodied hand at things, if the animation turns to pointing you can click to walk over or pick up an item. You can use arrow keys or WASD to look around, and you'll have to. It is an interesting mix.

Your horse has four stats:
 * Affection: raise by petting and feeding, lowers with time
 * Fitness: this seems to be more of a rest indication, it rises by waiting and falls when you take your horse outside and walk around, but you will get notified that your horse needs movement sometimes, so I guess up/green is kinda bad for this one?
 * Hunger: raise by feeding/watering, lowers with time (and maybe faster with exercise?)
 * Cleanliness: raise by cleaning your horse and stable - this one is a little funky, you don't have any indication whether your horse or your stable is the one in need of cleaning (unless it gets low enough to trigger a notification) and while you clean the stable, it will actually go down as you take out the "dirty" straw and trigger a fat notification that you have to clean it until you put enough fresh straw.

For hoof picking, you just point the hoof pick at the horses hoof and ankle, channel your patience, wait for it to lift the hoof and then make vague motions trying to stay on the hoof while the animation looks like the pick is somewhere inside the middle of the hoof. Try not to freak out. Repeat for remaining three hooves.

Stable cleaning is actually quite satisfying, since you just pick up all the straw with the pitchfork and put it into a wheelbarrow and then use the pitchfork to take fresh straw and distribute it. This will all be really visible, even the pattern in which you drop the little rectangular patches of straw.

Outside world
You can leave the stable by clicking the little swing door above the stats. Suddenly, you have an actual character visible, and those character outfits in the stable you could choose between that seemed so pointless for your disembodied hand have an effect! Here, controls change to just walking around with WASD, press D twice to run a little bit. The camera turns with you as you walk, but don't ever try to turn around, it takes FOREVER. Your foal might get stuck on a bridge and you'll never notice, cause it was just trailing behind you and it's far too much effort to look back at it.

After a little walk you reach an area with two shops, where you can buy some things, but others will be curiously greyed out. You'll unlock them by winning shows. There are tabs for different categories of items, some categories have two tabs, and then on the tabs, some have multiple pages as well. Have not found the logic in it yet.

Walking further, you will reach a bridge that leads to the show arena. Here you can train for shows, aka, just do a dry run of the show except nobody besides you is there. It will tell you how you would have scored and placed. At some point, you will get a notification saying that there is a local show. It will have no info on how to participate or whether the show is at a certain time, but just get your horse ready and go to the show arena on that day and this time it won't be a dry run but an actual show!

For foals, showing is just a beauty pageant. You walk along a ring with different judges who will score in different categories. There is care, fitness and decoration (TODO: anything else? Can't remember). So you have to clean your horse before you show and dress it up with little bows and the like, which you can purchase at the store.

The game progresses in days, which you can end early by clicking on the day in the lower left corner. At the end of the day, you'll see a little summary of how well you cared for your horse that day and whether anything special happened. Winning a show is not something special for this. You'll get some credits (amount based on how well you did that day?) and when you close the summary, the next day starts and your suffering continues.

Trivia
Your saves appear as horses running around in the pasture on the main menu screen, which you can click to continue playing with that horse. This is a really cute idea.

Differences between Releases
There is a “Special Edition” which includes the following bonus features:
 * An editor for horse decoration
 * Any shop is now accessible
 * The possibility to longe horses
 * Exchangeable hairstyles for the horses
 * An online mode to compare results with other players
 * A pin board showing pictures of successful moments

The DS version is also included in the 3in1: Best Friends – My Horse + My Vet Practice + My Vet Practice in the Country box set published by TREVA Entertainment.

Compatibility
Runs fine on a dedicated XP machine.