I was surprised to see Equinox Homecoming announce its plans to launch out of early access on March 5th (yes, tomorrow). As an outside observer, I was under the impression it was still a long way from finished.
Fortunately, the developers at Blue Scarab Entertainment offered a free public demo as part of Steam’s recent horse fest (which is a thing, apparently), allowing me to get a taste and see if it felt ready for prime time. Cozy horse girl mystery MMO is certainly a unique concept, but can it deliver on its promise?
In Equinox Homecoming, players take on the role of Alex (Alex’s gender and appearance being up to the player) as they return home to the island of Alderwood, where everyone gets around on horseback because reasons. Alex’s estranged, mentally unstable mother has gone missing, and there are hints of other strange and disturbing events taking place on this seemingly serene isle.
Right off the bat I want to say I absolutely love the idea of mixing up a cozy game with a creepy mystery. Much like survival games (which I consider the other side of the same coin), “cozy” games have a lot to offer, but they often feel too purposeless to me. Adding a clear story arc with some real drama to is the perfect remedy to that.
One of my absolute favourite things in fiction, regardless of medium, is a good balance of darkness and levity, but it’s something that very few stories offer effectively. It feels like everything is either completely lacking in true drama or stakes, or unrelentingly grimdark, with no room for beauty or serenity.
Equinox Homecoming feels like one of the few stories that can do both. Flashbacks to Alex’s traumatic upbringing and present day investigations into mutilated animals and strange happenings give the game a real sense of tension, but between those moments you can find relief from the darkness by riding down peaceful forest trails and picking flowers to gift your neighbours. Love it.
I was a little disappointed that the story appears entirely linear, with no choices whatsoever to be made by the player. I wasn’t really expecting a huge branching narrative, but at least getting some dialogue options for how Alex responds would have been nice.
In practical terms, the game is pretty much a walking simulator – or more technically, a riding simulator. The horse riding feels pretty good, though not as good as New World (which is now my gold standard for mount mechanics as it is for so much else (sigh)), and the horse can tend to get tripped up on small obstacles when offroad.
I did like that you don’t need to continuously hold down the forward key when riding. You just throttle up or down between various gaits, only needing to hold down forward when you want an extra burst of speed, which is limited by stamina.
Outside of the main story, there’s horse races, and you can collect various items to gift to the island’s residents for minor rewards, mostly new clothes and gear for your horse. These do have stats, though it wasn’t entirely clear to me what the stats did, and there’s separate slots for the gear that shows visually versus what you get your stats from, which is nice. You can also earn XP for both Alex and their horse, though again it wasn’t clear to me what leveling up actually got you.
You can also take care of your horse by feeding it, grooming it, and so forth. It has meters for hunger and such that decrease even when offline, but there’s no penalty for letting them deplete. You just get XP for refilling them.
I was disappointed there’s no mini-games for these activities. I wasn’t expecting anything deep or challenging, but for a game so into its horses it would have been nice to get to interact with them more deeply. I always expect lifeskill focused games to put more effort into those mechanics than conventional MMOs, and I’m always disappointed.
I’m also concerned that Equinox Homecoming is launching before it’s truly ready. While I didn’t encounter any game-breaking issues, the demo build felt very lacking in polish even after almost a year in early access. Character animations are awkward and unnatural, which is especially noticeable in cutscenes, and I encountered lots of minor bugs. Interactions taking a few tries to go through, rubberbanding, that sort of thing. At one point a major NPC’s teeth textures bugged out mid-cutscene, making it look like she’d just taken a hockey puck to the face. It was very distracting.
The graphics are odd, too. When you look at the wider vistas, it’s a very pretty game, but when you zoom into the details the textures feel vaguely off somehow. The Steam reviews have some people accusing the game of using AI assets without apparent evidence, and I don’t think that’s true, but there is an uncanny look to it at times that is reminiscent of what you get from gen AI.
Beyond that, the thing I couldn’t stop wondering while playing was, “Why is this a multiplayer live service game?” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed what I played of it, but I couldn’t escape the feeling this would have worked much better as a tight, focused single-player experience.
The kind of mystery this game’s story promises feels like the sort of thing that absolutely demands a clear beginning, middle, and end, not the kind of open-ended story-telling you see in live service games. What if the game fails, and we never get to see how the story ends? What if it succeeds, and the story gets stretched out into absurdity to keep people playing?
I don’t see what benefits the multiplayer aspect offers to compensate for these drawbacks. Aside from races, there doesn’t seem to be much content where you actually interact with other people. They’re just kind of there in the game world. I guess it helps the island feel inhabited?
Going in, I wasn’t sure what to make of Equinox Homecoming, and honestly, I still don’t know. I really like what it’s trying to do, and it’s got a lot of charm and heart, but it seems as if it needed more time in development, and I’m hesitant to risk money on it when the live service nature means we may never get a conclusive ending to the story.
