Sound of Horses

I just finished the first chapter, as this is still in early access I want to give my thoughts and some feedback to the devs as well. Overall it's a promosing game and very impressive for such a small team. I also appreciate that the following chapters will be added in for free with the game price increasing, this model seems more fitting, since the game tells one continuous story. The positives: - Like many have said the world is the best part of this game. There's a lot to explore and it feels lively with npsc and animaly moving around in it. - The characters in general were given some thought and they have their charm and unique backstories, which I like a lot - The quest based system leads you through the story and there's a good mix between high and low stakes tasks - I love that you can hide the minimap, it really improves the gameplay when you have to think a bit more about navigation (please add a few more signposts though, or a few more remarkable items on some of the crossings (a fountain, a statue, a special tree etc.) to improve the orientation - The main storyline and the mystery elements seem very promising - Having mechanics for swimming and pulling carts is really nice - It runs smooth like butter on my laptop, no loading, no framerate issues, it seems well optimized - The music is nice and it has a nice variety of calmer, happier and more tense, darker soundtracks On what to improve: - The horses feel like an afterthought in this game, which is ironic for a horse game: They don't make any sounds except when you run into an object or they eat. They don't have any unique traits. None of the other horses in this world have names or are even mentioned in the dialogue. The training and leveling up doesn't really change anything about the riding gameplay. They also don't interact with each other when you ride up to another horse and they don't have idle animations when you're standing around. They don't even have a stable and you never need to take their saddle off. Have them try to eat grass and bushes, have them neigh at each other, have Lily and Tom mention their horses names, age, what they like, what bond they have. Why are their grandparents just "giving away their old horse" without any emotion? Not all of the mentioned things are neccessary but please put some more thought into making these horses feel alive and not like some vehicle - The horse animations need some tweaking, like many people have commented please fix the jiggly butt. I do however think the points above are more important. - There are too many quests where you have to follow someone. For the first chapter it's fine and it can be fun to chase after Lily but after a while it feels infantilizing as if you can't navigate yourselves. Maybe in the second chapter the quest partner could sometimes say "You lead the way, I'll follow you" to change things up and give the player more agency and responsibility. - The quests really feel like they are just qued up after another and the character is supposed to do everything right then and there. After a while it starts to feel like a series of "now go there" "now do this" "now follow me" "now go here". Especially for the smaller quests the player should be more free to choose the order of the tasks and what to do next. For example the woman at the guest house could say "Margot asked for some help with x today and Walter needs y if you have time for that. Also Lilly said she'll wait for you at place z." And then the player can decide what to do by going to these places and accepting the task they want. - Some characters could use a little more developement in their storylines but I'm hopeful that more will come in the future chapters. Tom for example feels kind of empty, he also lost his parents and had a lot of responsibilities put on him on a young age - The German translation is quite bad, that's why I ended up playing it in English. It really needs to be fixed since not everyone can just switch to English Still, I had fun playing it and the price is super fair at the moment. I'm excited for what's to come and hope the devs work on some of these aspects to make it truly great :)