Horse Girl (Samuel Mui, 2023) Review

Hello there! I am starting my blog with a light and non-controversial topic, as one does. Today we are looking at "Horse Girl" which is a "GM-less journaling RPG" by Samuel Mui concerned with transforming a human being into a horse.

Before reading the booklet, just from the blurb, I thought I should expect either a wild fetish game, some insane body horror or a statement piece about the experience of trans people. After reading the review, decide for yourself!

Conclusion

To be blunt: The whole thing doesn't fit my definition of an RPG. It has more to do with a guided meditation than with AD&D. It's a randomizer for writing prompts with a weird Jenga mechanic and the singular d6 feels tacked on and could easily be replaced. There is no decision making; any game mechanic facilitates randomness. It might be enjoyable for people that want writing prompts and have no problem playing naked and colouring in their anus with a sharpie when asked to.

Still I had some fun reading through it, even though I haven't "played" it and I am not planning to do so. It includes some powerful statements about toxic relationship, some parallels of what it might feel like to be transgender and also some grim horror. Maybe it's some kind of art after all?

Content Warning and Premise

Here is the content warning of the little booklet (which might extend to this blog article):

I want to add another content warning of my own:

Samuel Mui proposes that it is fine to use 2d6 instead of 1d12.

This makes me cringe because I do see all of this through the lens of traditional, choice-driven tabletop RPGs that are played with a group and a DM. So these are the ramblings of an outsider bumping into this on pure chance and I want to have a bit of fun here. No hard feelings and I respect the effort of the author.

You get my undiluted ignorance here because I didn't bother to look up "journaling RPGs" in any depth. Apparently there is a whole sub-genre of these kinds of games and the engine used in this game is based on "The Wretched". Regarding content, I am a big horror fan and watched a couple of the mentioned movies; I might not be a diehard body horror fanatic, but I can appreciate it.

The whole setup is that you are a young woman that falls in love with this guy and because you are so traumatised and he empathises, you agree that he turns you into a horse. A real life horse. Through training, medication, surgeries, etc.

So when He offers you a room in His mansion where the both of you can live together in bliss for the rest of your lives, you say “Yes!” - even if the sole condition is that you’ll be surgically and mentally transformed into a horse.

Just a couple moving in together.

Design

First impression: great title page, the design looks nice to me. In general I share GMS magazine's verdict: overall colour scheme and design are great with some slight oversights in the general layout of the boxes.

The booklet uses a lot of space. We have:

1 page introduction
1 page premise
2 pages game mechanics
12 pages of card descriptions that should be looked up during games
1 page of epilogue / debrief.

This already feels very much like a card game, but I don't want to dictate what people call their games.

Game Material

Here is where it already becomes unfamiliar to me: you draw cards from a 52 card standard playing deck and look up their meaning in the booklet (Leyline Press also offers a special card deck that has all the text already on it so you don't really need the booklet anymore). You also need:

Some tokens and the author suggest to take fingernail clippings or apple seeds.
A marker to draw on your own skin (hopefully non-toxic because you might be told to mark your tongue).
A six-sided die (d6) and a Jenga tower (!) which makes with the cards for a total of 3 different ways of randomisation, which feels excessive. I would get rid of the gimmicky Jenga tower and if card mechanics were streamlined, we could get rid of the die as well.
A notebook to satisfy the "journaling" aspect of the game, which seems bonkers to me but I don't want to judge. On the other hand, I do keep notes on my game sessions which might be a slight parallel?

Game Mechanics

Turns are called "months" (at least most of the time, the explanations of the ♥ suit call them "days"). Every turn you throw your die and draw as many cards. You lay them down in front of you and flip and handle them one by one which I find cool. Every card has a piece of narrative on it. Some directly explain what happens, some are more writing prompt in nature. There is no mechanic in place if you run out of cards but later it's explained that you lose after drawing all 4 kings, so it's fine. You can also lose by tumbling the Jenga tower and 33 (if I counted correctly) cards tell you to draw a block.

After you flipped over all the cards that you drew this turn, you are supposed to write what happened to a journal.

Some cards ask you to mark your real life body parts that underwent transformations. The author suggest to play completely naked and "immersed in nature". Even though there is also some sexual content, to me it doesn't specifically (only) feel like a fetish game: Abuse and the body horror take center stage.

The Cards

♥ say some cute relationship stuff as well as hint at abusive behaviour of your lover. ♦ feel similar, but there are some arguments and random relationship activities mixed in. ♣ are all the traumatic and grim experiences that broke you and then ♠ is where all the batshit insane stuff happens.

♥ / Hearts / Him

A♥ is the only win condition. We put tokens on the card, after each turn we have a little chance to remove a token and if there are no more tokens we run away, remain scarred but alive and survive this toxic relationship with as much humanity as we have left. Fun fact: If A♥ is one of the last ten cards, we have no way of winning the game whatsoever.

You love his smile. - the way He grins at you when He thinks you're not looking. Him being happy with you makes you feel happy with yourself.

There are some seriously cute texts here on some cards, like 2♥.

Heartwarming shit. But the toxic relationship shows: 10♥ tells us that he threatens to kill someone you love? Which might be nice of him because your family is really bad, as we will learn later with the prompts on the ♣ cards.

The Kings are always the potentially game-ending cards: if you draw your fourth, the game ends in a way described on the last King. Downsides of this essentially come from it being a card game: I would love some surprising text here (put it away into the appendix, an extra deck, some envelope, etc). And more text because this is the bitter end and some of these ends could be really horrifying, but we only get a glimpse because the rule text takes a away a lot of space on the Kings.

♦ / Diamonds / Us

A♦ doubles our chances of winning, if we already have an A♥. A♦ contains the interesting and obvious point that harmony is not always a good thing in a relationship, because we might need arguments to break free of abusive ones.

In a moment of vulnerability, you ask Him to tell you everything about yourself: every strength, every flaw, everything good and bad and horrible about you. He tells you everything you want to hear.

Some have some surface level cuteness as well, as J♦,

This card lets you pull a block from the Jenga tower. Probably an implication that opening up in this toxic relationship brings you closer to your downfall?

K♦ lets you birth a half-horse child if it's the fourth King you drew. Great stuff.

♣ / Clubs / Remembering

A♣ let's you pull from the tower but doesn't bring you closer to winning, so apparently not all Aces are "winning cards" but still all the kings are "losing cards". The deck is stacked against you, literally even.

Your earliest memory is being punished for something you did and you sobbing your eyes out as you hid behind your bedroom door. You were very young, around 4 or 5. For some reason it still sticks around in your head til today.

2♣ is an example of early childhood trauma.

All of ♣ are ways you lost contact to your family, how your childhood was bad and how you blame yourself for everything. Depression fuel. To me some cards here seem to be weird writing exercises because you are tasked to describe your bad thoughts yourself. The cards of the other suits usually are completely prepared narrative bits but some of these are more open prompts.

The King's narrative bit is again lacking for me because it's too simple and short.

♠ / Spades / Transformation

Now we enter the real horror part and the most fucked up stuff in the whole game.

Illustration of an x-ray of a hooves which reveals a human hand inside.

The ♠ chapter starts with a real banger of an illustration. Love it!

A♠ also doubles our chances of winning with A♥, but it doesn't stack with A♦, so this could be just an empty card. Another nitpick: The removal of your vocal cords on Q♠ clashes with some other earlier cards that detail longer conversations.

3♠ lets your lover take off your fingers and toes and attach hooves instead, J♠ gets your collar bone removed (yo wtf), and 8♠ ends with the author telling you to:

Draw a red dotted line around your belly and anus and pull from the tower.

Normal move on family game night.

For me these cards are the meat of the booklet as they are the most extreme and what makes it unique; some serious tomfoolery:

Meditation techniques that bring your character to only sleep upright and for a few minutes at a time.
Steroid creme that makes a horse's coat grow on the whole body. (Here you are told to draw dots on your whole body.)
Building muscle to carry saddle plus your lover.

All of this within a month each. Which is quick and you draw up to 6 cards per month, all of which could be parallel procedures that start and end in the same month. Maybe it would be more "realistic" if some ♠ cards were processes and others put tokens on the cards until one transformation is done? Probably silly to expect any realism from the let-yourself-be-turned-into-a-horsey-simulator but let me be.

Debrief

After all these sections, the game ends with a quick debrief, which is appropriate because of the subject matter and really needed because the game-ending King cards have really short endings. The author's attempt at it is okay, I guess. Sample:

Look at your body. [...] How far did the transformation go before the game ended? How much of you has changed? Do you think there's still a chance that things can go back to normal? Then, think about the choices you made.

A bit of reflection, okay. But what choices? The only choices you could have made would come from what you decided to journal, but not from the mechanics. This inability to chose, this fundamental impotence could have been part of the game's narrative in my eyes. But if you want to highlight choices, then give the player the possibility to choose! Let them flip up multiple cards at the same time and decide what to do. This, again, would be a fundamental change into the direction of what is usually understood to be a "game" and not a collection of writing prompts (nothing wrong about the latter).

Some Unnecessarily Technical Analysis

I had some half-baked and really boring analysis of the winning and losing mechanics here. Nobody would have cared. I was even thinking about writing a script to get a numerical solution for success vs. failure probabilities but this write-up already took my whole Friday evening and I want to go to bed.

The gist is that there is a good chance that you start with a deck configuration that won't give you the chance of winning. But there is zero player agency and just randomness so it doesn't even matter and winning / losing is akin to a casino game. The whole ordeal is biased towards failure which is what the booklet advertises. It's meant to be a bad experience I think, so this might work, I don't know.

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