I’ve had my eyes on Hobby Horse since I tried its demo and fell in love with it instantly. This is a parkour-adjacent game that has players ride a hobby horse around various showjumping/Crufts-styled obstacle courses to beat the timer and achieve gold trophies and online leaderboard glory. I’m delighted to say my love only grew stronger as I galloped through the full game. This is one of my top 5 game recommendations of 2026.
Hobby Horse is a single-player affair, as you’ll be riding your hobby horse in first person and need your wits about you to make a good job of it. Controls for using the mouse and keyboard are available, but I largely recommend a controller because of how jumping works. Steering your hobby horse is simple enough, with a drift boost when holding an additional button, allowing you to blast out of corners. Jumping requires pressing and holding a button to build up your jump height and releasing to clear the different obstacles. Most obstacles in Hobby Horse have between one and six elements to them, each requiring up to a full meter of jump. You could, in theory, gallop slower and charge up the jump meter to the max for each jump, but that will never win you the gold trophy for that course. This is where a large portion of the skill comes in. If you release the jump meter at the right time and level and only just clear the hurdle, you’ll gain a 0.5 or 1-second bonus back on your timer. Get it wrong, and you’ll clip a hurdle bar and gain a time penalty instead. Welcome to the risk vs reward battle of skill and bravery.
This bonus vs penalty system is so, so good. You can play it safe as you learn the track and reach a bronze or silver trophy, but to get gold, chaining perfect jumps at speed will be required. Alongside jumps, you’ll have to skid underneath some obstacles, use bounce trampolines to fly through horseshoes, rail grind like you are in a Tony Hawks game, and wall run like a parkour specialist. Each discipline takes getting used to, and the six environments layer these on over time. In late-game tracks, you’ll have options. You may have a tricky grind rail to navigate, but it’ll have a clock freeze pick up on it. It’ll be the longer route if you fail, but the track design baits you in. What makes this all so enjoyable is that the controls are consistent, simple, and easy to pick up. My only critique is that balancing grind rails using the analogue stick feels very “all or nothing”. I feel like there should be a bit more of a slower, weighted nuance to that control scheme, as it feels too binary and can cause mistakes.
The six environments all come with their scenery, hazards, and unique twists. As you complete levels, you’ll start to unlock variants of the tracks. These include wreckathon modes, where the goal is to run through every obstacle, not jump over them, and a low-gravity mode to pop balloons as you navigate tracks. These are fun additions, and they all come with their own Steam leaderboard to see how you measure up against the world. Clearing tracks at different trophy grades also unlocks lots of customisation. You can have four hobby horses decorated with eyes, manes, mouths, hats, material, and, critically, a stick type. A new stick type is unlocked at the end of an area, and they alter the jumping, speed, and agility stats of your hobby horse. It’s worth having a horse that specialises in each function so you can swap them out for the appropriate track. You can also customise your room and your human appearance, but since your human isn’t really on screen, I didn’t bother with that much.
I absolutely did bother with the track editor, however. The track editor places you in set camera angle points in each area you’ve unlocked so far, with access to every obstacle and piece of scenery in the game. That means you can place snowmen in the desert, as nothing is locked away. Building a course is as simple as selecting obstacles and checkpoint markers and placing them onto your map. The editor then automatically draws the racing line between each obstacle. Your main concern is ensuring you select obstacles in the order you want to tackle them in your course, as they’ll always be taken sequentially. It is very simple to set up a level, and once you’ve raced it a few times, you’ll be able to tweak the trophy timers and number of laps if it’s a circuit. Dropping in some power-ups and scenery keeps things visually sprightly, too. Any levels you create or download from the Steam workshop appear alongside in-game levels, so if the community picks up, your track menus may be very long, but you’ll have a massive game to enjoy.
The sheer joy I’ve had playing Hobby Horse cannot be underestimated. It’s quirky comedy, mixed with pure skill requirements to be at the top of the leaderboards, makes this one of my top 5 games of 2026. I adore it. If you love time trial racing and want to try something a little unusual, Hobby Horse will be my recommendation. This is an absolute blast to play. I’ll see you clippity-clopping out on the track!
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