Disaster Report: The Unicorn Princess (PS4)
At first glance it might seem a bit like I’m singling out The Unicorn Princess because it’s an easy target. For some reason there is a cultural belief that it is okay for media aimed at children to be low quality, so doing a long review tearing down a game for little girls can seem unnecessarily harsh. However, let’s reframe our mindset for a moment and consider instead how we would approach other products meant for kids.
Imagine a little girl asking you for a teddy bear as a gift. Now you can go the expensive route and get a nice custom-made bear with top of the line materials, or maybe the budget is a bit tight so you instead try to find a decent one available that still does the job. Maybe instead you try to do something more personal and buy one from a brand you loved as a child or even just hand down a bear you still own. Now let’s take this and apply it to the world of video games. If a young girl asks for a video game, perhaps you’ll get her a game from the Kirby series, a full price but excellently made game that is enjoyable for players of all different ages. If you want to spend a bit less, games like Crystal’s Pony Tale or Finding Nemo on GBA aren’t great but they are decent games the child will likely get something from. And if you want it to be more personal, you can maybe hand down a classic from when you were a kid like Super Mario Bros. that you likely played around their age despite it not being labelled as a “children’s game”.
In this comparison, a game like The Unicorn Princess is a raggedy old bear you found at the top of the trash can where you can maybe wipe some of the garbage off of it even if the smell won’t go away. The Unicorn Princess does feature horse-riding, but you can likely find a more solid simulation of that for free on a phone or tablet. It has obvious technical problems, and while a video game should nominally hold a child’s interest for quite a while, this three hour journey even has things in place to make exploring what little freedom there is unnecessarily annoying. The Unicorn Princess uses its title as a lure, it presenting some stereotypical feminine interests and hoping the twenty dollar price tag makes it more appealing even though that will still feel like overpaying for the level of quality it offers.
When I went to play The Unicorn Princess I expected at least something like the My Friend Peppa Pig game that caters to its audience enough that it at least feels like it has a place. For this game though, think of this more as a buyer beware, as this innocuous fantasy horse game is counting on you not caring that it’s awful to make its sales.
HORSING AROUND
The Unicorn Princess has you playing as a young girl named Leila who seems to not yet be an adult but she lives on her own in a two-story house with a stable with space for quite a few horses. It’s a reasonable child-like fantasy to want to live this style of life and you are given a horse for free at the start to ride around on, and guiding the horse is easy enough. It has a bit of a turning radius you might need to account for and backpedaling is sort of sloppy when you just overshot something you’re trying to pull up next to, but The Unicorn Princess isn’t really trying to be realistic with its horse-riding so much as functional.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on horses in video games, you can check out The Mane Quest for that specific niche, but there are some basics one should expect in a game where you spend most of your time on a horse to the point the game’s camera seems to actively resist you being indoors, getting stuck on walls and at bad angles quite easily just while you’re moving around. One odd absence is a satisfying sound for the galloping, or even much of a sound at all as I had to turn my volume quite high to hear it and it still seemed barely present at times after I cranked it up. Your horse can run at variable speeds, but even if you have it galloping at full tilt the stamina system meant to discourage it is not much of a worry. You can hit a decent speed before it even starts to drain, and when the speed is maxed out, the meter still drains slowly enough you barely need to concern yourself over it and can always slow down for a few seconds and soon have enough stamina for another long ride. If you do let go of the control stick even for a second the horse comes to an abrupt stop and snorts at you, and considering how long some rides become later in the game your thumb may even get a little tired holding that stick and thus lead to a short interruption as you try to adjust it.
There really isn’t much to be worried about while on horseback, even water being perfectly safe to plunge into on your steed. Your horse will slowly doggy paddle around if you take them into deep water, this feature actually appreciated since the shortest line from your house to the town where most things of interest happen has a river breaking it up that you can at least swim across to save some time. It’s only clear intended purpose though is for swimming out to an island that has one of the game’s collectibles on it, but it still feels like it will intersect with your play more than the horse grooming because of its value in making shortcuts. As you ride your horse its condition will gradually wane, notably at quite a slow rate. If its condition too low, as indicated by a heart icon emptying, it won’t be able to jump, which isn’t something your normal horse needs to do ever but can at least let you leap over fences to make shortcuts across a map that’s too large for how empty it is. You can groom your horse back at your house, although unfortunately the brushing and sponging section are both empty activities. You don’t need to clean any specific part of the horse, you can just rotate the brush or sponge in one spot and it will clean just as quickly as trying to give it a thorough scrub. Removing dirt from the hooves at least has you poke at specific spots to remove dirt clods, but they’re in the same spot every time. When I’m praising the dirt clod removal as one of the game’s better features though, that does speak for the quality of the other kind of activities you get involved in.
Riding around on the back of your normal horse will let you explore a countryside without much to look at. More worryingly though, looking at it is held back quite a bit by awful draw distance. This term refers to how far away an object in a video game is before it is rendered visible to the player, and in early 3D games it was sometimes low due to the weak technology being worked with. As such, it can be understandable, even for a modern budget game, to get a bit of slack on what appears as you near it. Trees and environmental objects are sometimes noticeably lower quality models before you get in close or will appear only when they’re a short ride away, but the open fields you ride through have grass that renders in an ugly manner. Cutting off only a few yards ahead of how you ride, there’s a noticeable line between what the game can load in and where it stops, meaning riding ahead leads to the vegetation ahead sprouting to life rapidly in a noticeable and unappealing manner.
If you aren’t working on story missions though, there really isn’t much to find. There is one scenic vista, a waterfall area in the top left corner of the map, but otherwise it’s a lot of rolling green plains, sparsely populated forests, barren farmland, and an occasional pointless landmark like a building with no relevance or a rock structure that looks a little strange. There is a large barn with horses stabled on its perimeter that has no purpose and sometimes you might find something that could have been interesting to investigate like a little mining area is placed behind fences so you can’t get close, but a lot of your time whether you’re looking for something to do on your own or just riding about doing missions has you traveling this boring landscape. There are unicorn statues to find out in the world, the golden figures floating in the air and often not even hidden with much thought. Many are just out in the open and easy to approach and grab, a few at least try to be placed somewhere a touch interesting like at the center of a campsite or on that island mentioned earlier, but if you look at the game’s map it really is as barren as it seems, only the town having some interesting spots like a chapel and graveyard that are mostly just there to break up the visual monotony.
THE LAST UNICORN
Of the game’s 15 story missions, about half will be done on your normal horse, but the others tie into one of the game’s selling points. Unica the Unicorn is a talking rainbow-maned unicorn from a dream dimension, and while I will give the game some credit for making the unicorn look close to the real horses in appearance rather than making her cuter, it isn’t really the best look. Her rainbow mane looks like a bit of a poor dye job due to how wispy the game makes all hair look and since Unica also has the same emphasis of musculature the normal horses have, she feels less like a fantastical creature from another realm and more like a sideshow attraction from a circus full of fake mythical animals.
While you can ride one of your regular horses any time you’re out in the world, Unica can only be ridden at specific points in the story, all of these besides the first kicking off with Leila waking up in her home and hearing the unicorn call out gently across the wind. The call of “Leila…” will repeat constantly until you find the big glowing orb of pink energy that represents the entrance to the dream world, and this can be quite bothersome if you’re trying to do anything besides head right to the mission. While you could conceivably do things like statue hunting during horse missions instead, near the end of the game, the last day you start has Unica immediately calling out to you and before you start her mission the game warns you to go do any extra activities you want to do before the finale. The problem is, if you want to go buy clothes, horses, or find those unicorn statues after this warning, Unica will not let up on calling out your name. The text box accompanying it might also need to be dismissed to perform interactions while wrapping up your activities, and while you can continue the game after you beat it, it starts you at the beginning of that day meaning Unica will hound you for any attempts to make your own freeform entertainment once the action is wrapped up.
When you do climb atop Unica and head to the dream world, the first thing you’ll notice is that before the load screen crops up, Unica tries to start explaining a mission but gets cut off as the data needs to be loaded. She will at least repeat that information once things are properly ready and once in the dream world you can ride around as you please with no more interruptions from her, but one thing you’ll notice is the dream world is really just a light reconfiguration of the same map you explore atop your regular horses. A few medieval buildings are placed here or there and the game is fond of populating previously empty areas with colorful military camps where no people reside and no weapons can be found, but it is mostly the world you’re familiar with but the sky’s a different shade. Leila is put into a pink outfit for these sections to maybe make her seem more like a princess although she never becomes one, and while you can buy and wear different outfits in the normal world, they will get temporarily replaced while doing this work for a horse.
As for why you’re traveling to another dimension, the story is a dream guardian has lost his helmet, shield, and sword that he needs to protect the dream realm. You are not told from what, and when you find him later in the story he’s standing in place and has even freshly lost the items you spent previous missions collecting so that you need to do it all again in one long mission that covers nearly the entire barren map. Poorly justified motivation aside, the important fact is you are finally on the back of the horse with a horn this game promised, and the game even makes her slightly more magical in that she has infinite stamina so you can ride her at full speed all you like without needing to take care of her.
Unfortunately, the missions you do while atop your unicorn are incredibly basic. There are three ring-focused challenges where you need to travel through a set of gates which may have a ring between them. The rings come in bronze, silver, and gold varieties and depending on the mission you are only told to collect one type. The gates are two rings wide though and only one ring will ever be in a gate at a time, meaning it is incredibly easy to see if the gate has the ring type you need ahead and either grab it or skip it. There is no timer so you can trot your way through them without concerns and even if you miss a gate you just need to go back and try again, the only failure state being to not grab enough rings by the time you reach the finish line. Failing actually requires more effort than succeeding though, because while collecting the wrong type of ring will cause you to lose one of the correct rings you already grabbed, there are plenty of the proper rings to collect in such missions and there is no pressure there to make you potentially mess up. Sometimes you may need to jump over an object between the gates but again you can approach this however you like and even just walking over the barrier if you position yourself right counts, and with these missions often rather long rides to boot they feel rather bland as there is not much of an active challenge to motivate you. There is a PlayStation trophy for failing a mission so I tried it with one of these and found I did just have to do the whole circuit and avoid all the necessary rings, a slow and thankless task that helped me also test to see if there was an easier way to lose and sadly even going through the wrong gates won’t speed up a loss.
The gates are actually probably better than the other mission type you’ll encounter while on the unicorn. The dream guardian’s lost equipment will be collected across individual missions, the game scattering a bunch of similar looking items about the space and telling you to find the correct one. While this would be difficult to do with the sword since it’s so thin you can’t really make out its details as you ride by, these floating items actually don’t require you to identify them much or really be careful when picking them up. Pick up the wrong one, and you can just grab the next item until you eventually find the right one. Moreover, while the game does have different patterns on things like the shields to make them visibly different, the correct shield is glowing thanks to a cloud of sparkles around it. Once you realize the sparkly item is always correct, it’s just a matter of riding around the nearby area until you spot the effect. Thankfully the game’s draw distance can speed up this uninteresting search some since even if the object is incredibly far away, as the sparkles will still appear in the distance. This definitely makes that final mission where the dream guardian has lost all three at once more bearable, although it does instead become about riding across a large area with nothing to do but wait until you reached the glittering object.
That’s hardly the worst mission type found in the game though, because when it comes to lifeless activities that don’t test you in any way, nothing beats the cart delivery mission.
THE HORSE BEFORE THE CART
Most of your missions riding your normal horse are fairly basic ones that send you from location to location without much of a challenge. Collecting ingredients just has you ride your horse to six locations to pick up the items off the ground for example, and when the city is full of litter from supposedly bustling tourists despite there not even being ten humans in the game, you just ride over the trash to clear it. These simple activities don’t really provide anything entertaining, but when you are told to deliver some crates of soda to the waterfall area, you encounter a moment in the game that is agonizing in its execution.
Attaching a cart to your horse, you are now moving more slowly as well as having far less control over your creature. The horse’s turning is limited and moving backwards with the cart can sometimes cause it to jitter around, so you just need to focus on taking the cart from the top right corner of the map to the top left corner, a long ride with absolutely nothing to do along the way. The journey is arduous not because there is anything difficult standing in your way, but because you are looking at an area of the world where there is absolutely no interesting scenery for long stretches while just moving forward to your destination unimpeded. You can go offroad, the cart doesn’t need to be handled with any sort of care, but that actually means there are even less considerations than if it was fragile so you really can just hold the control stick and watch as the cart sluggishly makes its way all the way over to the waterfall area only for the recipient of the soda to send you immediately back to town with a cart full of empty bottles.
There is no thought involved in completing this mission. There is no difficulty in merely moving from one location to another. If we view this as some sort of life simulation angle, the horse isn’t acting like a real beast of burden nor is the cart treated with any degree of realism since you can bounce it along hills while jostling the cargo. While finding the very obvious glowing equipment isn’t difficult, you are at least still searching for something. This mission could almost be completed if you use a rubber band to hold the control stick forward and then adjust once you reach the delivery spot so it could hold it forward again a second time for the trip back. If it was quick or offered something to look at then at least it could be just a way of briefly including some new way to utilize a horse for work, but it is the slowest the game gets and even has the otherwise acceptable controls get made worse so that you don’t want to do anything but head forward and get it over with. This is certainly the straw that broke the unicorn’s back on even pretending this could be acceptable for a child, because while we don’t often give their standards much credit, doing one empty activity for so long can strain even an adult’s attention span. It can take upwards of 13 minutes to do this mission with that being an estimate based on a youtube walkthrough I found, but to imagine a child sitting there for all 13 minutes and perfectly driving forward is hard to imagine. I was even growing sleepy doing this part of the game, but the flagrant empty content found in this mission is where I knew this game deserved more than just being written off as normal trash.
It’s not like the other missions are doing anything to counterbalance it, and while Unica pays you for every mission you complete, the clothes, hair dyes, and other horses you can buy with it are mostly rather plain beyond a weird medieval knave look Leila can assume. They don’t all look bad, but they’re hardly adding much to a game that is in desperate need of some excitement. Perhaps one of the more shocking elements of researching this game is that the developers, Caipirinha Games, also made a horse game called My Little Riding Champion before this one.
Notably, the world map featured in that game is almost exactly the same, down to the village, lake, and waterfall being in the same place, and that pointless barn with all the horses stabled was actually a holdover from that game where it was a tournament hall. While I cannot speak for that game’s quality having not played it, it has the exact same horse-cleaning minigame and there being actual tournaments with the possibility of failure from not performing jumps properly makes it seem like much more of a game than this one. In fact, the main selling point here over My Little Riding Champion appears to be just the addition of a unicorn while removing and weakening other systems. It seems to have many similar problems like the lack of a good gallop sound, but it is far more of a game and inexplicably is the game that came first when usually the simpler and less polished title is the one that gets improved upon in a follow-up. Considering they are both budget games, any justification for buying The Unicorn Princess seems to have gone right out the window, even though unfortunately its predecessor also has long boring cart missions.
BEATING A DEAD HORSE
The Unicorn Princess is a mind-numbing experience lacking in any sort of magic. A short experience with empty activities that still manages to drag thanks to each mission being overly long without any real danger of failure, The Unicorn Princess is an egregious attempt to coast by on appealing to very basic ideas of what little girls want. However, little girls probably don’t want to pull carts by holding a control stick in one direction for nearly a quarter of an hour, and with an open world empty of anything interesting to find or interact with there’s not even any fun to make for yourself. Ugly technical problems make the game feel cheap on top of low energy, your activities more a sequence of mindless chores that even a toddler might find condescending in their simplicity.
Once you learn that My Little Riding Champion is pretty much the same game but much of its additional features and any degree of challenge has been pared away, it’s hard to see this as anything besides a cynical way to get more money with very little work. In fact, it likely was an attempt to double dip from the same audience, as it’s not likely games for little girls will have the degree of research done for the parents to know they might be buying their kid a game that is seemingly the same as one they already own but worse. There is something to be said for simplifying a game so younger players can play it without worry, and that something is that it shouldn’t completely remove any activity with any sort of energy or difficulty to it in order to get there. If you want to make an open space for someone to ride a horse around in that is one thing, but the missions provided here should have given interesting direction to play to make it more than an open area to move some 3D models around in. The cart mission is not immersive, it is not entertaining, it is not challenging, so all it is is a way to waste a player’s time for even daring to play the game they own, but at least it’s not a unicorn mission so that avoiding it won’t have her calling out “Leila…” ad nauseum.
It is possible you find it unsurprising that The Unicorn Princess turned out to be an abysmal experience, but there are ways to design these games to be both entertaining and accessible. If you want to play a game about riding horses, there are games made by people who seem to actually have a love for equestrian activities that are more polished and provide a wider breadth of content. There are games that aren’t even about horses that still provide more interesting horse play. I enjoyed my time atop Epona more in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because not only does she have a reasonably sized and interesting area to explore in Hyrule Field, but there are some challenges specific to riding her that aren’t just going someplace to grab some item. The Unicorn Princess is barely even putting in the bare minimum for its promised style of play and thus captures neither the fantasy nor the reality of horse ownership, let alone the wondrous concept of riding a unicorn through a world of dreams. Caipirinha Games seems to care very little for their products though, making games in a wide range of genres in a short amount of time and even recycling content across their games or supposedly stealing from others. City Patrol: Police seemingly lifts the map and assets from games in the Crash Time series yet strips away some of the content to make it barren as well, so perhaps the jump to The Unicorn Princess from their own My Little Riding Champion is just them trying the same trick but with something they actually made.
Regardless, if someone does ask you for a horse simulation game, even one that stars a unicorn and princesses… well this one would already be ineligible since you’re not a princess, but more importantly, look elsewhere as this game is barely trying to be anything and still failing at it since there is no heart or creativity to be found anywhere in its design.
