"Saddle up and build your own horse ranch! Raise foals, care for your horses and train them as you explore the western wilderness! Participate in cross country competitions and become your town's champion. Befriend the villagers who'll help you on your adventure at the Ranch of Rivershine!"
— Steam Page Description
The Ranch of Rivershine is a simulation game about raising horses. It was developed by Cozy Bee Games and released on May 2023. It is currently in Early Access.
This game includes the following tropes:
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Some quests reward you with new pieces of tack for your horses, which are purely aesthetic. One example is River's quest, which gives you a blue saddle pad.
- Alternative Calendar: The game is split into four 28-day (4-week) seasons, resulting in a 112-day year.
- Auction: Randomly generated horses can be bought at the Rivershine Auction, and the player gets their first horse this way. Story progression unlocks "tiers" of auctions that sell better-quality horses.
- Automaton Horses: Averted. Horses require daily feeding and grooming in order to perform at their best. If they aren't cared for, they'll get sick, which means they can't be raced, sold or bred.
- Creature-Breeding Mechanic: One of the core mechanics of the game is breeding your horses to get foals with better skills or beautiful coats.
- Dying Town: Rivershine Town. At the start of the game, many of Rivershine's businesses and homes are boarded up. It's stated that since the last champion left, the town has been struggling with a lack of visitors.
- Early Game Hell: You start out with a wild horse that has no trust and very low skills, which makes winning even the beginner races a challenge. As you progress through the game, you unlock better horses and skill-boosting food items.
- Edible Theme Naming: The game generates horse names from a pool of adjectives and nouns, which include several food names. The player can rename horses freely, but there is some comedy value in names like "Shiny Sugar".
- Horse Jump: One of the main features of the game is cross-country competitions where you jump obstacles on your horse.
- Level-Up at Intimacy 5: A non-romantic example. Once a horse's trust stat is built up, the horse can be whistled for.
- Rare Candy: Winning races will imbue statues with power, which can then be used to increase a horse's stats. Any horse can have their stats maxed out through repeated statue use.
- Shout-Out: Many of the villager homes contain pastries from Lemon Cake, another game developed by Cozy Bee.
