HORSE CLUB Ride West takes schleich’s toy riders off the paddock and into an open Wild West

Horse games are one of the largest quiet corners of the medium: stable sims and pony adventures that rarely get a headline, yet are played with real devotion by a young audience the rest of the industry tends to look past. Schleich’s HORSE CLUB, the German toymaker’s line of figurines built around four friends and their horses, is one of the steadiest of those worlds, and Wild River Games has already carried it from the playroom floor to the screen twice, in HORSE CLUB Adventures and its sequel. With HORSE CLUB Ride West, the studio makes its most interesting design decision yet: it takes away the fences.

The premise is a road trip. Hannah, Sofia, Sarah and Lisa leave their home stables for the Wild River Ranch, and the game trades the series’ green paddocks for deserts, canyons, hot springs, abandoned mines and cactus oases. The release frames it as an open world that puts far more weight on free exploration than the earlier HORSE CLUB Adventures games, and it pairs that with a new art style drawn more closely from the original figurines, so the characters on screen look like the toys their players already own.

Two riders and a dog cross a sunset desert of red mesas and cacti in HORSE CLUB Ride West — Image: Wild River Games

The real argument, though, is in the saddle. Wild River has rebuilt the riding system with new controls and reworked animations, and Western riding takes centre stage: a new slide maneuver lets riders cut fast, tight turns, the kind of move that makes barrel racing feel like a skill rather than a cutscene. There are six rideable horses, each with its own temperament, and their attributes can be trained: speed, stamina, agility, jumping and, tellingly, friendship. Putting the bond between rider and horse on the same sheet as raw speed is a small decision that says a great deal about who this game is for.

Around the main story sits the familiar scaffolding of an open-world adventure, scaled for a younger player: side characters with their own requests, missions, tournaments and minigames that range from archery to playing guitar around a campfire. More than 100 combinable customization options cover both riders and horses.

A cowgirl plays guitar by a campfire next to her horses and a dog in HORSE CLUB Ride West — Image: Wild River Games

In the announcement, Ralf Gronwald, CEO of Wild River Games, calls the game “a new major milestone” for the HORSE CLUB series, aimed at longtime fans and newcomers alike. Development was supported by the German federal government’s commissioner for culture and the media, a reminder that Germany treats even its licensed family games as part of its cultural industry.

HORSE CLUB Ride West is out now. It is available digitally on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, while physical editions for Switch and PlayStation 5 come through a partnership with Silver Lining Interactive, a publisher based in the north of England. On Steam, the game lists full English, French and German audio.

The Wild West has always been a story about open land and the animal that crosses it. For a franchise born as plastic figures on a bedroom carpet, Ride West finally gives those horses somewhere to run.

Tags: open-world games, Silver Lining Interactive, HORSE CLUB Ride West, horse games, Ralf Gronwald, schleich