Minecraft began from humble origins, but if the next game from that title’s creator Notch (aka Markus Persson) manages to become a multiplatform, multimillion-dollar enterprise, well that’ll be a horse of a different color. Notch’s new game is called Cliffhorse, you see, and it’s a game in which you control a horse roving a green hilly landscape, occasionally pushing a ball. And that’s it.
Notch apparently built the game in just a couple of hours using freely available assets; it’s free to download, too. Or if you’d rather, you can buy it with dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on the Internet meme featuring multicolored Comic Sans and a Shiba Inu. The game itself was inspired by the weird way your horse interacts with its environment in Skyrim, the open-world fantasy RPG for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC that represents the last single player game in the Elder Scrolls franchise. Your mounts in that game could operate at dangerous angles on fairly steep slopes, as can the equine star of Cliffhorse.
The game, which is part satire, part random fun, is available on Windows only, and might never evolve beyond its current state. It’s also the only place to find out what it would be like if a radioactive spider bit a horse instead of Peter Parker.