While playing Horses, I was filled with dread for a revelation that never came. “This is creepy,” I thought, “but surely there’s some big thing in the next scene that pushes the envelope too far.” Yet despite the drama, I am here to tell you that Horses, the cause célèbre from Italian developer Santa Ragione that has now been prevented from being sold on Steam and the Epic Store and was temporarily delisted from the Humble Store, isn’t that troubling. Yes, it contains disturbing scenes of sexual violence and abuse, but so do many great works of art. The acts themselves are cartoonish, goofy, and self-censored. If this is what’s considered the limit for which games can and cannot be sold on mass marketplaces, then we’re all in trouble and everyone involved in that decision should be thoroughly embarrassed.
Note: The following features images and plot details from the game Horses which some people may find disturbing.
High horse
In Horses, you play a 20 year old man named Anselmo who has been sent by his parents to work on a farm for the summer. The game is entirely in 4:3 black and white, and the sound of a film projector is heard in the background constantly, with speech rendered in text cards like a silent film. The farmer shows you around and introduces you to his livestock: a pen of “horses” that are actually just naked (yet blurred-out) people in horse masks. “These are my horses, they’re my pride and joy,” he says in subtitled Italian. You then proceed to get on a horse piggyback style and do a goofy jumping mini game while a player piano noodles in the background.
As the game goes on you are instructed to do various errands around the farm (water the plants, chop wood, feed the “dog”) as revelations about the nature of the horses reveal themselves. The farmer tells you that fornication between horses is forbidden, and that you must report any horses that you catch in the act. You come to learn precisely why the horses are like that, what motivates the farmer, and witness various acts of punishment and sexual violence. Importantly, these acts are rarely shown explicitly; all nudity is censored, and much of what is done is occluded in a stylized way. It’s easy to draw immediate thematic parallels to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros or Peter Shaffer’s Equus, although the most obvious comparison is Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Both are deeply Italian works about power, the body, and sexuality, although Horses is censored, does not feature real people, carries far less baggage, and is nowhere near as complex by comparison.
Horses is a sophomoric game in both good and bad ways. The sex acts themselves often feel like the Unity asset version of two naked dolls being slapped together. Often this is funny, and the game can carry an absurd, cartoonish delivery that feels intentionally alienating. It is a cumbersome game to play, deliberately slow in the way that artful indie games tend to be. Its message and metaphors about sex and repression land with the subtlety of a brick, which I find a little charming in an Italian, absurdist way. But these scenes can overstay their welcome, and the symbolism feels, appropriately, a little tortured.
There are moments of grief and loneliness I find genuinely striking in Horses. There is a scene of a gelded horse man on his knees in a field, his mask’s eyes dead and his will to live severed from him. He is broken. And yet there are other times where I found myself saying “I get it” as the various tasks take forever and their intent is obvious. Yet despite being long in the tooth at times, the message of Horses does land and is immediately parsable by anybody with a passing familiarity with any art form that isn’t video games. It’s a message that resonates far louder given that Valve and Epic seem terrified and deeply confused by a work that could not be any clearer if it tried.
What the Hay?
In different circumstances I do not think Horses would be controversial, a game mainly noteworthy among people who like intentionally unpleasant art horror games. To play it after all this is deflating; so much controversy over…this? This makes its de facto ban confusing, damning, and downright weird — it constantly feels like there’s a part of the story not being shared. I’ll concede that it is understandable that a game with this content would trigger alarm bells. Santa Ragione speculated that a scene in an early build where a “young girl” rides the shoulders of one of the horses may have led to Valve rejecting the game in 2023. But they also claimed that they aged the girl up to an unambiguously grown woman and found it to work better in the context of the game – a point I agree with having actually played it and seen the content of the scene.
The doubling down from Valve without any specificity or opportunity for appeal is damning enough, but the sudden 11th hour banning on the part of Epic raises eyebrows even further (Santa Ragione says the Humble delisting was temporary so the storefront could “reevaluate” the game.) Scandal sells, and this is great marketing on Santa Ragione’s part, or it would be if the way that PC games are sold was not functionally oligopolistic (although you can still buy the game on GoG, Humble and Itch). You need only play the game or watch a playthrough to realize just how embarrassing it is that this game has been made a pariah. This is not Irréversible. But regardless of how you feel about Horses, it is undeniable that it has become an important work merely by existing and being deemed deviant.
Both Valve and Epic have been vague and contradictory about what triggered the bans, with the latter pointing to policies around “explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated” and a “‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policy” that prohibits abuse of humans or animals. This can only be read as nonsensical ass covering, particularly in the light of Epic seemingly reapplying for the game’s IARC rating last minute, which is by all accounts objectively weird behavior.
If the invalidating content was slavery, then Final Fantasy XVI, Fallout: New Vegas and Dragon Age: Origins would never be allowed to be sold. If torture is unallowed, then GTA V violates Epic’s terms of service with “By The Book,” a mission where Trevor tortures a guy by pulling his teeth out with pliers and electrocuting his nipples on behalf of the government. Americans understand and respect graphic violence, torture, and abuse as art, and on that front Horses is far less graphic than any 30 seconds in a recent Mortal Kombat game.
And even if we were to limit this to the topic of sexuality, you do not have to go too far on Steam to find far more depraved games that Valve is fine with publishing. Hell, if we were to narrowly limit our criteria to the specific topic of uncensored half-equine hybrid penis, one of my favorite games of the year, Baby Steps, clears Horses easily and can be bought on Steam and PSN.
What this underscores is the sheer danger of market consolidation in gaming. While companies like Valve and Epic do not legally have to carry a game, to not do so is functionally a death knell for that game on the PC; Santa Ragione has said it threatens the studio’s continued existence. This is not equivalent to a theater chain declining to carry a movie; this is two (mostly one) American companies more or less deciding what content is commercially viable across most of the world, in ways that are somehow more vague and opaque than the MPAA. This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business. Horses cannot be the ceiling for what is artistically and commercially possible in games, because otherwise we are in deep horseshit.
Broken horses
Despite my minor issues with the game, I want to talk about a scene in Horses that I love. It is the scene that Santa Ragione speculated may have caused this controversy, the one with the “young girl” that changed during development. Despite its reputation, it is not actually a scene about sex, but rather one about money, deviancy, and power. As you guide the daughter of a businessman riding horsepersonback she makes explicit what is often implicit in life.
“I know what you're thinking. I know these aren't real horses. But...you know, the way they used to live...A lot of people find that unacceptable. I don't care, personally. But usually, people exhibiting immoral behavior also have dangerous ideas. Like my dad always says, each of us is a cog in the machine; we must all do our duty so society can function properly. So dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone. Because if the machine jams, everything falls apart. And we can't allow that to happen! The farmer... He does what he does. And my father...Well, my father makes sure that his business opportunities keep growing. It's simple: In this world, on this farm...everyone who lives their life recklessly and indulgently ends up exactly where they deserve. Do you know what I mean?”
I cannot claim to know the minds of the people who shot down Horses, but the vagueness and hypocritical nature of their responses point to an unspoken rule: Art that is deemed a liability to business must be avoided without question. Gaming is often many things, but its status as gambling and toys take higher precedent than its ambition as an art form. How these decisions are made is arbitrary and capricious with supposedly immutable guidelines that can, somehow, change in a heartbeat for the right game.
A private company pulling a game from distribution the day before it was set to be released is a punishment for being “reckless and indulgent”--not censorship, in their own telling, but a game maker ending up “where they deserve.” Banning Horses is an exercise in power, and to quote Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Power can essentially do what it wants, and what it wants is completely arbitrary, or dictated by economic needs that elude common logic.”
