Most games have you playing as someone powerful, such as a soldier or leader who has the power to turn the tide of war the an assassin lurking in the shadows to change someone's fate. With the exception of Death Stranding, no game lets you play as the one responsible for delivering information from one place to another. That is exactly what The Legend of Khiimori does, and it does so with the added bonus of playing in a region that few games ever explore. We got a chance to check out a guided preview of the game before its Steam Early Access launch in early November, and we came away pretty impressed.

The demo starts with your young courier riding a horse to a village. After talking with the village elder, you're tasked with delivering ink to a budding cartographer. Unfortunately, the cartographer is missing, so you must find him before you can deliver the ink. This particular questline naturally asks you to help more people along the way, so you'll end up building a network of people to support one another.

The game is fairly deep when it comes to the health of your horse. That should come as no surprise when you realize that the developer's previous games all revolved around riding horses. Your horse has a health meter and temperature meter in addition to indicators for food, water, and general mood. There's a stamina meter, and while you can't ride your horse to exhaustion, you can deplete the horse's stamina by riding at their fullest without any breaks. This can be fixed by taking care of your horse, and tasks like grooming them can take place at any time, so you're never reliant on outposts or camps to provide horse care.

The team seems to have a handle on how different environmental conditions affect your riding. Riding on grassy lands is fine, and you'll find that your horse will automatically start grazing if you stop at a grassy spot. The same goes for watering holes, where speed may be diminished but your horse will automatically drink when you stop. Start running on mud, however, and the horse will slow down.  The longer you're on muddy ground, the more stamina is used. Running in snow would produce the same effect, so it's nice to see that the different terrains affect gameplay and aren't just cosmetic. There's a level of minutia in riding that forces you to account for everything you do. You can carry items on horseback, but you will need to pay attention to where you put those items. Balancing things becomes important to ensure that you aren't unintentionally draining your horse's stamina. Taking a jump badly can lead to injury, which needs to be treated before adverse effects come into play.

Horses can be leveled up, and it's all done through actual performance. For example, constantly sprinting with your horse will eventually build up their overall stamina, and taking jumps can lead to building up horse strength. Tolerance to heat and cold can be built up with exposure to those elements, but the faster way to build up horse stats is through breeding. The game has a full library of horse genetics at your disposal, so you can have a better idea of what kind of horse you'll get instead of relying on dumb luck and randomization. It's both impressive and surprising.

With all of the details present for the horses, it is good to see that the developers haven't forgotten about your character. In an effort to keep the focus on being on horseback most of the time, you'll be able to collect items without getting off your steed. Crafting can also be done while on your horse, and this is interesting since the demo showed us that going up against animals can be done in non-lethal ways. You can shoot arrows at them, but you can also craft animal repellent to drive them away while you go about your mission. While the arrow shooting system is well realized at this point, the developers have stated that combat isn't going to play a huge role in the game.

From a mechanical standpoint, The Legend of Khiimori is interesting. The focus on traveling and performing smaller tasks instead of full-scale warfare is refreshing, and doing this in a large open world creates possibilities for emergent gameplay. While the game is hitting Early Access in early November, there is a demo coming out during the Steam Next Fest, so it is worth checking out if you're on the hunt for something different.