The Wild Horse
A muscle car, a meteor, a giant robot · five Gears across Earth, space and an underworld
An Arizona mechanic’s muscle car is taken over by a meteor and becomes the giant robot Horse Power. Five chapters (“Gears”) of road trip, in which every beaten enemy ends up living in Ralph’s house. This is the whole screenplay, readable, with the characters and their quarrels, the places, and everything that is still open.
Meet the driver and the voice
Ralph and Stacy as the game’s 3D characters. Drag to turn them around; if your browser cannot show 3D, the drawings stay. More of the cast, with Cosmic Rider, on the characters page.
Premise and tone
1 Premise
Ralph Durden is an easygoing, loud classic-rock-and-cola mechanic who lives in a mobile home in the Arizona desert and has built a red-and-black muscle car (“inspired by the Ford Mustang Boss 302”) piece by piece. While he buys parts at Charlie’s junkyard a meteor lands, pulls in all the scrap and his car, and becomes a giant robot with a female AI that calls him “planetary defense personnel”. The unit is a Planetary Defense Unit (PDU) of the Galactic Federation, sent to Earth after a cry for help; it chooses its pilot itself. Ralph renames it Horse Power and its interface Stacy.
2 Tone
The tone is comedy-action with a soft heart: the dialogue is road-trip banter and swearing, with running gags (the junkyard bill, burgers, the judge not asking Ralph’s name and Ralph not asking Lin’s, “YEEHAW”), homages to anime, Gundam, Sonic, Genshin Impact, Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, Star Fox and Knowhere, and a hero who treats his machines and his enemies kindly. Ralph never kills a beaten enemy; he takes her home. By Gear 5 there are five housemates and a fixed family routine, and the script itself says so: “having a family is expensive”.
3 The script itself
The script is written as prose stage directions with the dialogue in quotation marks, plus gameplay descriptions (segment types, enemies, boss mechanics) in the same document. The five Gears below follow the document’s own GEAR n headings.
The five Gears
Arizona
A meteor eats a junkyard and builds a robot.
Bailey the hitchhiker, Charlie’s junkyard, the meteor, the robot, the Grand Canyon and a giant biblical angel who turns out to be a fifteen-year-old magical girl, Dani. Ralph takes in Dani and Bailey.
Read Gear 1 →
Area 51, space, Europa
The aliens’ base is on a moon of Jupiter.
Stacy has found the aliens’ base on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Ralph and Dani take a spaceship from Area 51, destroy the base and take its beaten colonel home rather than leave her stranded.
Read Gear 2 →
The Galactic Federation
Arrested, tried, and the treaty was a lie.
Arrested by the Federation, tried in a court colony, Ralph is cleared when Stacy exposes the 1945 treaty as a lie signed by the pirate lord Steinberg. The favor mission: destroy the pirates’ old PDU, a girl-shaped war machine, which Ralph saves.
Read Gear 3 →
The Amazon and Eldorado
The dragon goddess just wants chocolate.
Giselle says the threat is the dragon goddess Quetzalcoatl in the golden hidden city of Eldorado. After the fights, the dragon proves to be a lonely goddess who wants chocolate and company. She moves in.
Read Gear 4 →
Yellowstone and the underworld
Armageddon is coming, and the road leads down.
Quartz warns of the titan Armageddon and the Mayan calendar. Ralph drives into Yellowstone, descends to a prehistoric underworld with dinosaurs and kaiju, and is led to a tribe’s village. The script ends mid-scene.
Find your way in
Characters
Every named character, first appearance, role, companion status and relationships, with a relationship map.
Meet them →
Places
The ten spoken lines of the Arizona town of Star Lights in full, and the places of every Gear.
Take the tour →
Open questions
Contradictions, missing pieces, an unknown seventh passenger, and a content note.
Open the file →Passengers
7 girls, one rides along
1 The seven
The designer says there are seven girls; one rides along as the passenger, and each is unlocked during a chapter. The passenger decides the second ult and the cockpit banter. Stacy is not a passenger: she is the robot’s AI assistant (radio, phone, GPS, hologram) and is always present.
2 Who is unlocked when
| # | Passenger | Unlocked | Ult in the script |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bailey | Gear 1, from the start (the tutorial passenger) | A joint that slows down time |
| 2 | Dani | Gear 1, after the Angel boss | Not described (usable in the Gear 3 plaza fight) |
| 3 | Lin (the alien colonel) | Gear 2, after the colonel boss | Not described |
| 4 | Giselle | Gear 3, after the Battle Angel boss | Not described |
| 5 | Quartz (Quetzalcoatl) | Gear 4, after the dragon boss | Not described |
| 6 | The underworld girl | Gear 5 (she is met, but no unlock is written; the script ends) | Not described |
| 7 | Unknown | Not in the script | – |
3 The seventh is missing
Honestly: the seventh passenger is not in the script, and nothing in the text identifies her. The sixth is the editor’s guess from the girl in Gear 5; the script does not say she becomes a passenger. See open questions.
4 Companion choices
The companion-choice moments: Gear 2 (Dani, the only branch written), Gear 3 (who stays: Lin goes, Dani stays, canon), Gear 4 (Giselle, canon), Gear 5 (Quartz, “obviously” canon). Branches for other passengers are not written.
The Horse Power
Forms and abilities
1 Forms
- Car
- Robot (the Horse Power)
- Spaceship (absorbed from a hangar at Area 51 in Gear 2, with a hyperspace option on the multimedia screen)
- Snow tires (Europa)
- Hovercraft with a boat hull (Gear 4)
- Off-road form (Gear 4)
- Submarine (Gear 5)
The extra forms arrive as the car’s data grows. Nanomachines create springs under the car for jumps. The interior stays identical in every form “due to the driver’s preferences”.
2 Robot moves
- Dash on jet skates (a dash tap is a dodge)
- Melee
- Ranged attack
- Charged shot
- Rocket punch (hold melee and ranged together)
- Shoryuken (hold attack)
- Switchable big sword with a stinger (dash plus attack)
- Block with a force field, and parry
- Spinning blade
- Dropkick (new after the Europa boss, called the Horse Dropkick)
- R2 grab and counter; X in the air to tech a throw
- Airbags in the cockpit
- Nanomachine gun (created when Ralph’s gun is missing)
- Headlight hologram that projects Stacy
3 Ults
- Two ults can be used per level, switched with R3.
- The default is the robot’s arm hitting the ground for a shockwave.
- The passenger in the seat decides the second one.
- Bailey’s is a joint that slows down time.
- The script gives no ult for Dani, Lin, Giselle or Quartz (it only says Dani’s can be used in the Gear 3 plaza fight).
4 Scripted finishers
- Angel Eagle Punch
- Colonel Horse Dropkick
- Steinberg Suplex
- Battle Angel A counted pin
- Guardian DDT with thrusters
- Quetzalcoatl A piledriver at the end of a QTE
Segment types
The script mixes eight kinds of play: Cutscene Tutorial Open world Robot combat Boss Shooter Linear level Travel, plus choices and the home hub. Each chapter page lists its segments in order, and every scene heading in the full text carries its kind. The kinds are the editor’s labels for what the script describes; the designer’s document does not use them.
Everything
- Gear 1, Gear 2, Gear 3, Gear 4, Gear 5: a summary box and the full text of each chapter, with a table of contents of scenes.
- Characters: every named character, first appearance, role, companion status and relationships, and a relationship overview.
- Places: the points-of-interest texts of the Arizona town of Star Lights in full, and the places of every Gear.
- Open questions: contradictions, missing pieces, and a content note.
- Credits: where the pictures, fonts and texts come from.
How this site was made: tools/docx-to-html.sh converts the two Word documents paragraph by paragraph, and tools/docx-verify.sh proves that the full texts on these pages are, character for character after whitespace normalization, the text of the documents.