Last year, I had the absolute pleasure of discovering The Mane Quest, a website dedicated almost entirely to horses in video games. With Elden Ring now out, and with riding featuring prominently, I wanted to check to see if they had thoughts about the game’s mount. I have not been disappointed.
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The site—run by game designer and horse lover Alice Ruppert—takes a light-hearted, if also deeply practical approach to the subject matter, and this Elden Ring review is no different. Rather than reviewing the game itself, it simply takes a look at Torrent—and some of the game’s other mounted creatures as well—and examines how “realistic” their animation and controls are.
In the case of games like Red Dead Redemption 2, their coverage obviously leans towards the truly realistic side of things, since those are actual horses we’re playing with and they can be directly compared. In Elden Ring, though, they aren’t really horses, and so the review is a little different.
Given the game’s magical foundations, most of it is just fine:
Mane Quest’s problems eventually turn up somewhere I’d never even noticed them, but now cannot un-see: Torrent looks like a horse, but their legs bend like…well like they shouldn’t, kinda like a goat, but also not really:
While aesthetically jarring, there is at least a point to it: goat legs might look weird, but they work.
I would also like to imagine that at some point in Elden Ring’s design process somebody said, “Maybe the player needs a horse,” and somebody else said, “Not fucked up enough, it needs to be a horse with goat legs,” and everybody nodded.
