There is a means of reviving them at the Great Horse Fairy, but you see people get a lot more attached to horses that in other games where horses are just purchasable mounts you summon from anywhere and then steal a new one when they die (see Skyrim). I’ve seen this make the relationships with horses really personal, particularly because horses can straight up die. In Breath of the Wild, in order to even own a horse, you have to tame it and ride it to the nearest stable to register it with limited slots. Since horses are pretty easy to get in game, it’s not hard to switch for a while.

You can spend some of the currency you get in game, which you also need for gear, to instead buy a cure or you can wait for the horse to heal. In Alicia Online injured horses can’t run at full speeds or trip more often, and since it’s a racing game, that’s a big deal. To go over these briefly, all three have different systems with how horses can be hurt.

For the sake of limiting that list, I’m just going to namedrop The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Alicia Online for two big budget games and one in SSO’s more immediate demo. There are a load of games that have mechanics where your ingame mounts can get sick, hurt, or even die. This might seem like a darker topic when talking about SSO and how it’s generally supposed to be lighter in tone, but there’s something that I see so many other games with good horse mechanics do and I wanted to talk about it in SSO.

Online horse game taking care