New add-on, iPhone & iPad
Build a barn, buy a herd and name every one of them. Feed them, water them, brush the mud off. Then send your visitors out on guided trail rides — or climb into the saddle and ride the trails yourself.
$0.99 · free with the Full Game + DLC Pack bundleSwitchback has always been about building trails people want to walk. Horses & Stables is the first add-on, and it gives those trails something new to carry: a string of horses that you buy, name, feed and look after, and visitors who will pay to ride them out to the view and come home another way.
Three barns, with two, four or six stalls. A barn is just room: every horse is a $26 purchase from the barn's card, one per stall, and your herd is only as big as your stalls.
Each stall comes with a name already picked. Tap a horse for its card and change it. The name sticks through saving, undo and barn upgrades, so Biscuit stays Biscuit.
In the first-person ride along, walk up to a horse and mount it. Walk, trot, canter and gallop, with stamina, and hold to jump. It will refuse a slope that is too steep or water that is too deep — and, rarely, it will buck you off.
Visitors pay to ride. Your Guide saddles their horse at the saddle rack and leads out ahead on a horse of their own. Riders tie up at a hitching post — the reins really are looped to the rail — and come home a different way.
Horses get hungry, thirsty and restless, and troughs and feeders are how you keep up. They get muddy, too: brush them, because a filthy horse puts visitors off and draws flies. And yes, the dung is litter.
After dusk every horse walks to a free stall and the door shuts behind it. Then it stands at the half-door, stands back, or lies down in the straw until morning.
Draw a fenced paddock as a rectangle, a circle or a free lasso. Gates appear wherever a trail crosses the fence, and horses from your barns are turned out into it to graze.
The Guide is your ranch hand: dressed for the job, living at the barn, leading the rides, working restless horses and keeping the troughs and feeders full.
Show jumps, log and brush jumps, cavaletti, weave poles and a barrel pattern, to build a schooling arena beside the barn and ride it yourself.
The horse is the first animal in Switchback you can ride, and the first domestic one. Lofted body, jointed legs, ears that move on their own, and sized right next to a Hikee.
Bay
Chestnut
Black
GreyPalomino
Buckskin
Pinto
AppaloosaNobody is scripting a show. A horse in a paddock gets bored, gets itchy, finds a friend. Happy ones squint. Galloping raises dust. Passers-by stop to watch a horse rear or roll.
Small barn, 2 stallsBarn, 4 stallsLarge barn, 6 stalls
Water troughHay feederHitching postSaddle rack
Hay bales
Farrier's forgeShow jump
Cavaletti
Log jump
Brush jump
Weave poles
Barrel patternPaddock fencingPlus the tack: three saddle styles with reins, and proper rider gear for your Hikees — helmet, body protector, stock and riding boots. And new horse audio: softer, deeper hoof clops, whinnies and snorts, each with several takes so you do not hear the same one twice.
The barn is sound, but the last owner let the rest go: the fence along the lane is down, the old corral is full of junk and the hay is still where the truck left it. Put the place right, buy a couple of horses, then lay a bridle path out across the pasture to where the basalt rim drops away to the river.
Take over a packers' horse camp below Mount Rainier. Ride a bridle loop through the Grove of the Patriarchs, find the one break in the Palisades a horse can climb, and reach the meadows beneath the mountain. Then bring your riders home a different way.
Clouds and rain now come from a single drifting sky, so every shower falls from a cloud you can see, fronts roll in, and rain is local. Fog fills the forest; the wind leaves white ribbons in the air.
With real optics: doubles against a dark storm, moonbows and fog bows. Visitors notice them and remember them, the camera turns to show you, and there are two hidden achievements.
Visitors buy a blanket or a basket, lay it out on open ground and eat. Candlelit dinners for two, stargazing picnics, kids running laps, and animals wandering over.
Moose in the Pacific Northwest parks, animals that steer around each other and the Hikees, flocks that lift off as a ripple, and about thirty buildings and lanterns that light up at dusk.
The full list, including a lot of speed — terrain maths about 25× cheaper and a Hikee drawn in 9 calls instead of 24 — is in the update notes.
Horses & Stables is the first add-on for Switchback, the cozy park management game on iPhone and iPad. It adds barns, a herd of horses you buy, name and care for, guided trail rides for paying visitors, first-person riding, paddocks, an arena, and two new parks: Rimrock Ranch and Tahoma Foothills.
It is $0.99 in the in-game store, and it needs the Switchback Full Game. If you already own the Full Game + DLC Pack bundle, Horses & Stables is included at no extra cost and unlocks on your next launch.
It is a national park management game first — you build trails, camps and viewpoints for hikers. With Horses & Stables it is also a small horse ranch and stable sim: you run the barn, keep the horses fed, watered and groomed, and sell trail rides out along the trails you built.
Yes. In the first-person ride along you can mount any horse and walk, trot, canter or gallop it, with stamina and hold-to-jump. It will refuse slopes that are too steep and water that is too deep, and very occasionally it will buck you off.
You place a barn with two, four or six stalls, then buy a horse for each stall for $26 of park money. Horses get hungry, thirsty, restless and muddy, so you place troughs and feeders and hire a Guide to keep them full. At night each horse goes to its stall.
Not yet. Switchback and its add-ons are on iOS and iPadOS only for now. Android and Steam are both things I would like to do, and neither is announced.
Only to buy it. After that the horses, the barns and both parks work offline, like the rest of Switchback, and your parks stay saved on your device.
Search Switchback: A Cozy Hiking Game on the App Store, then find Horses & Stables under Activities in the in-game store.
iPhone & iPad · $0.99 add-on