The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild offers players a remarkable amount of freedom in terms of gameplay. For the moment, however, I’m completely obsessed with taming the prettiest horses.
The huge world of Breath of the Wild is dotted with wild horses you can tame to get around on. In order to tame them, you have to sneak up on them, soothe them by petting their manes, and feed them apples. If you register them at the various stables in the game, you’ll be able to name them.
It’s a part of the game I’ve found myself getting lost in. As soon as I name a horse I ascribe them a personality and feel affectionate towards them. They’ve just gone from almost bucking me off their backs to eating apples out of my hands. Now they’re my precious babies and I love them.
My first horse is a beautiful lady named Marnie. I found her pretty early on. It was love at first sight: all the horses have different colorations, and while spotted horses are explicitly stated to have worse stats, I loved her little polka dotted behind.
Unfortunately, Marnie was a bit slow. That’s when I found Bert, with his chestnut hide and ivory patches. What a handsome boy—and just fast enough to justify stabling Marnie for most of the game. I’m so sorry, girl.
While not everyone at the Kotaku offices are as horse crazy as me, Luke Plunkett and Kirk Hamilton also got into the whole horse taming business. Luke, in fact, reminded me last night to include his horse Patchy in my forthcoming post.
Kirk has a variety of horses, including the wild Mad Jack and kindly Blackie, but I think my favorite of his is Mr. Nubs.
While I love Marnie and Bert, my own private goal was to find and tame a blue horse. My co-worker Jason Schreier has told me that Breath of the Wild has a bunch of horse secrets I haven’t uncovered yet, but I can’t imagine anything more tantalizing than a blue horse. Fueling my obsession further was the fact that Kirk and my other co-worker, Heather Alexandra, have blue horses of their own, named Blue and Azure respectively.
I need to stress that there’s nothing special about blue horses. These were not the horse secrets to which Jason had alluded. But look: they’re blue. And I need one.
The problem was that I was only seeing solid-colored blue horses, and I wasn’t able to tame them. While solid-colored horses have better stats, they’re much, much harder to tame and usually buck you off before you can ride on them. So I stocked up on stealth potions and food and stalked a pretty, deep blue horse across a plain for about a half hour of my real life time—only for it to kick me in the goddamn head.
I turned off the game, dejected. All I wanted was a blue horse. Was that too much to ask? No joke, while I love Breath of the Wild in a way that I haven’t loved a game in a long time, it made me reconsider why I’m spending hours of my life within it. My horse search had me so stressed out that I felt that maybe I needed a break.
And then the next day, I found her.
Raincloud is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. While I’m still on the hunt for Jason’s horse secrets (I love that this game has horse secrets), I’ve found the love of my life. It’s you, Raincloud. At least, until I can catch one of those pink horses I’ve seen around.