Markus Persson

Animals, it seems, don't necessarily live exciting lives. Compare Goat Simulator to Goat Petting Simulator. One has explosions and mayhem, the other has a single, lonely goat and existential angst. Cliffhorse, by Markus "Notch" Persson, is probably closer to the latter, although there's slightly more action.

The horse simulator was created just because he could.

"I was watching PewGeminiLive streaming a blind playthrough of Skyrim, and kept jokingly referring to the game as 'Cliffhorse' because of the hilarious horse physics," Persson wrote on Reddit. "After a while, people started saying I should make that game, and I said sure. About two hours and a bunch of free Unity assets later, Cliffhorse was done."

The game itself is free, which is a good thing -- there's not a lot going on. You're a horse and you run around hills. There is a giant ball that looks like it's made of the bitmap of the horse's skin and you can chase it around and knock it backwards. There are also mountains. You can't change the camera angle, so it's just WASD all the way.

You can also pay for the game (which is, according to the website, in "early access", but this is also a joke -- no further development is planned for Cliffhorse), but only in Dogecoin.

"Is ironically buying an ironic game for ironic money actually ironic? I don't know. Does it have to be?" Persson wrote. "In a world where The Colbert Report contains more actual news than Actual News, subversion through humour seems to be one of the best things going on."

You can pick up Cliffhorse here.