Horsey Game is a $10 Steam oddity where mutant duck-cars count as horses

Horsey Game, a $10 Windows PC release from Captain Games, is a low-poly horse breeding and racing sim where the game's definition of "horse" is extremely generous — mutant centipedes, alligator-giraffe hybrids, and ducks fused with muscle cars all qualify.

You start by driving a truck around a neon pixelated map, lassoing wild horses in nearby fields and keeping them healthy enough to race and breed. The real game opens up when you hit the abandoned CRISPR lab and start splicing DNA. Key locations include a power plant with a giant hamster wheel, a swamp full of breedable alligators, Hacienda Picante (hot sauce is apparently a critical racing strategy ingredient), and a sumo ring. Navigation mixes point-and-click with WASD or arrow keys, and the puzzles — like powering up the CRISPR lab — stay light, keeping the focus on gene-splicing creativity and tense race finishes. The actual goal, easy to forget amid all the chaos, is raising $62,375 to help a character named Sweetie.

The community has already gone deep on optimizing hybrid builds, with players logging hundreds of races to analyze leg angles and center-of-gravity on their mutant creations. People with actual science backgrounds have apparently praised the game's surprisingly accurate treatment of nucleotide shuffling.

Horsey Game is out now on Steam for $10. Good luck, and don't forget about Sweetie.