Everything in this $10 Steam game is either a horse or a nightmare

Breed and race horses. Or alien-duck-car hybrids.

Mutant centipedes. Ducks that are partially muscle cars. Many-legged dogs, sentient vehicles, and alligators with giraffe heads. In Horsey Game, most of what you see on the neon pixelated map is automatically categorized as “horse” (even if no biologist on earth would agree with that assessment). This results in a couple of very intriguing conclusions:

Firstly, if you find something new while driving around in Horsey Game, you can probably throw it in your truck, cart it to the lab, and tinker with its DNA. And then, if it’s a “horse,” you can race it. And if you can race it, that alligator-duck you’ve created might just win big.

A quick guide to the chaos: What’s happening in Horsey Game?

Developed by Captain Games and released on Feb. 18 for Windows PC, Horsey Game is a simulation game that combines three activities you often see grouped together: horse collection, horse racing, and highly complex genetic modification. But don’t worry, there’s a heartbreaking story involved, too. Immediately after booting up Horsey Game, you’re informed in a brisk, tragic sentence that your partner, Sweetie, has a severe case of horse flu. The only thing that will help them is a treatment that costs exactly $62,375. You do not have $62,375. In this economy? Come on.

So you hop in your truck, you buy a lasso to catch wild horses in nearby fields, and you figure out the basics of keeping your horses healthy enough to race and breed. Since it becomes clear that no horse you merely find is going to be as competitive as your situation requires, though, you’ll soon find yourself exploring an abandoned lab to see if there’s anything you can do to improve your odds.

I won’t spoil anything that isn’t accessible in the game’s first 10 minutes, but to help you get started, see if you can find the following locations:

• The power plant with a giant hamster wheel; this should be one of your first stops
• The swamp (another first stop; this is where the alligators hang out, and you’ll want to breed them)
• Hacienda Picante, or where you get the hot sauce that will become a critical part of your strategy
• A normal suburban house that is exactly that and nothing more
• The sumo ring (again, something you’d usually find in a horse betting game!).

Navigation in this low-poly world feels seamless with a mix of point-and-click and WASD or arrow key movement, and the few true puzzles you encounter – such as, for example, powering up the CRISPR lab – are relatively simple. This puts Horsey Game’s focus exactly where it should be: Creative gene mods, and edge-of-your-seat horse races.

(If you’re playing, go ahead and bookmark the Horsey Game subreddit and this helpful Steam page on genome mapping. You’ll need them.)

Fans of this game have gone all in on mapping out the best alien-bug-vehicle hybrids to shave seconds off race times. People with science degrees have weighed in on the surprisingly accurate way the game treats shuffling around nucleotide bases. Eagle-eyed horse racers with hundreds of in-game races under their belts have chimed in with lists upon lists of the best way to select a winning horse, with players analyzing the angle of a “horse’s” legs and just how top-heavy they appear to be for hours on end.

Thinking about checking out Horsey Game yourself and seeing just how quickly you can raise the $62K — sorry, the $62,375 — to help Sweetie? (Did you forget that that was the main point of the game? No worries, that happens to everyone. Sorry, Sweetie.)

Horsey Game is out now on Windows PC. Good luck at the races.