Not quite girl, not quite horse: The latest gacha craze sweeping Steam is a bizarre idol management game for anime highschool horse girls

I have a vague memory of a childhood summer spent inside an amusement arcade, absolutely rinsing the crap out of a horse racing game. I'd put coins into whichever colour horse I deemed best before watching tiny plastic jockeys riding them along a rail, praying my favourite would win and I'd make a return on my precious pennies so I could do it all over again.

Surprisingly, child gambling didn't seem to do much damage to my psyche beyond turning me into an irredeemable gacha sicko. My penchant for toy stallions never transcended to real ones, and I've managed to maintain a safe distance from betting shops for the majority of my adult life. But after playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby, I wonder if that's because Ladbrokes isn't plastering anthropomorphic horse girls on its tellies.

Bookies' favourite

This gacha game has been out in Japan for over four years now, but a worldwide release in June (off the back of what I've heard is a very good anime adaptation) it's seen steady traction on Steam. It's been roping in around 20,000 concurrents pretty consistently, and after losing an entire night's sleep to its deceptively complex management systems, I can absolutely see why.

If, like me, you haven't seen the anime, you might be surprised to discover that the Umamusume don't quite veer into horse or girl: They straddle a strange line. They're too human for it to feel normal seeing them lined up in teeny-tiny starting gates, but too horse for me to comprehend that they simply sprint around a racetrack. No galloping to be seen.

I haven't quite been able to shake the strange limbo the horse girls exist in, but it's all easier to take in when you discover that they're all based on real-life horses. Seriously, go look at the Umamusume wiki and look up Agnes Tachyon—inspired by a horse who retired after four races but came away with a 75% win rate—or Gold Ship, whose adorably eccentric behaviour was bestowed upon his anime counterpart.

It's… incredibly bloody stupid. It's not the first time gacha games have humanised otherwise very non-human things—Azur Lane's characters are based on historical warships, while Girls Frontline's cast are all inspired by firearms—but there's something especially silly about the entire concept of Umasumune. Probably has something to do with the fact that they're also idols, who'll put on a big song and dance every time they win a race. Yeah, I don't know either.

But underneath its whimsical surface lies a seriously moreish management sim. Each girl has five stats: Speed, stamina, power, guts, and wit, with the core gameplay loop centering around increasing stats that play to each horse's strength. Some will prefer shorter distances, while others will excel in lengthy marathons.

They'll have preferred strategies once they're racing, too: I played through a couple of careers with T.M. Opera O, who prefers being a pace chaser or a late surger, coming up from the back of the pack in the final stretch to claim victory. I then dabbled with Silence Suzuka, who instead performed much better when shooting to the front and maintaining a lead throughout the race.

Knowing which stats to increase is crucial to completing each Umamusume's career goals, like gaining fans or placing well in certain races. I'm given a limited amount of time to hit each goal, so time and resource management is vital to making sure I'm going into mandatory races with my horse partner in a good mood and well-trained enough to beat out the rest of the pack.

There's even some mild roguelike elements to the whole thing. Different skills crop up throughout each of my career runs which can give all kinds of boosts: Improving performance in different weather conditions, making it easier to power through on straights or corners, and skills to help negate any negative status effects should my horse girl falter at any point.

There's a small selection of guaranteed skills which'll appear, but most come randomly through certain events while training stats. I was even able to clutch a few races by scooping up discounted skills that showed up thanks to these events, which forced me to think a little more about which races I picked to play to all these different strengths.

Optimising a career run takes way more thought than I'd anticipated—picking the right skills, levelling the correct support cards to give me additional stat boosts when training, and knowing how to juggle each resource—and with some of these careers taking me up to two hours right now (pass or fail), it's an all-consuming experience I was not expecting out of a silly horse girl gacha.

I've gone from not caring much about Umamusume—mostly downloading it out of sheer curiosity—to slotting it into my regular gacha rotation in a matter of hours. I've been streaming some of my runs to my pals in Discord, too, like we're all old blokes holed up inside a Paddy Power. Arms folded while sat on those comically slippery plastic stools, betting slip in hand, screaming at the monitor for Mihono Bourbon to make the final push and slip into first-place victory. Lest she gets sent to the glue factory.