"Sounds like the kind of lie kids tell each other about video games": Steam is praising a simulator where you crossbreed horses with humans and cars — 96% positive reviews

That's how one player described Horsey Game in a review, and it's hard to put it better. On a neon pixel-art map, you'll find multi-legged dogs, ducks half-made of muscle car, mutated centipedes, and alligators with giraffe heads roaming around — and the game calmly classifies all of them as horses, even though no biologist on Earth would sign off on that taxonomy. The logic is simple: if a creature is registered as a horse, you can enter it in the races.

It all starts with tragedy, though. The moment you launch the game, you learn that your partner Sweetie has come down with a severe case of horse flu, and the only cure costs exactly $62,375 — money you obviously don't have. From there: a truck, a lasso, catching wild horses in the surrounding fields, and the realization that ordinary racehorses just don't bring in enough cash. That's when an abandoned laboratory turns up on the map.

That's exactly where the game veers into madness. Your arsenal now includes CRISPR for direct DNA editing, alongside a power plant with a radiation zone where you can send horses to trigger mutations. And you can crossbreed absolutely anything: humans, ducks, swamp crocodiles, fish, rabbits, even cars. There are essentially no limits, and every generation gets stranger than the last.

There's a darker side to all this fun, too. A creature's stat panel can show a brain icon — meaning it's sentient. Through mutations and genome editing, it's entirely possible to breed a creature with no eyes, no mouth, or no head at all, while it remains fully aware of its own existence. That's the foundation of the reviews' dark humor: one player writes that his eyeless freaks run so fast because they're trying to escape him.

Meanwhile, the community has approached all of this with academic seriousness. Players are mapping out genomes, calculating optimal hybrid builds for shaving off a few seconds, and people with actual science degrees are praising the game for its surprisingly accurate handling of nucleotide base-pair swapping. There's even a whole discipline around evaluating a "horse" at the starting line by leg angle and center of gravity — a top-heavy creature will simply faceplant halfway through the race.

The whole thing was made by Canadian developer Justin Smith under the Captain Games label — the same creator behind the minimalist Desert Golfing. The game launched on February 18 for Windows and Mac, costs $9.99, and the main storyline takes about three hours to finish. The ratings reflect all of it: 96% positive out of more than 2,400 reviews, an "Overwhelmingly Positive" tag, and a spot near the top of Steam's best games of 2026 list.

Would you breed a duck-car hybrid to win a horse race — or do you prefer simulators where horses stay horses? Let us know in the comments.