A Prince, a Field, a Very Specific Kind of Face

You’re in a meadow. There’s a horse. The horse has a man’s face—handsome, actually, good bone structure, soulful eyes—and he has feelings about you specifically. He is, as these things tend to go in Japanese romance games, a cursed prince. Of course he is.

My Horse Prince is an otome game—Japanese romance games aimed at women, where the player navigates relationships with a cast of attractive men—except one of those attractive men is, from the neck down, entirely a horse. The game was developed in Japan and released globally on iOS and Android, which tells you something about the developers’ confidence in the universality of this particular fantasy.

The mythology of the human-animal hybrid goes back as far as mythology itself—centaurs, minotaurs, kitsune, every culture has something—but what’s distinctly Japanese about this one is the sincerity. The game is not a joke. It commits to its horse-prince premise with complete emotional investment, which makes it funnier and also, somehow, more affecting than it has any right to be.

One thing I’ll say for the developers: they had the sense to keep his horse half anatomically accurate. The reverse configuration would have been a very different game, and probably not one Apple would have approved.