Horror Game Horses Banned: Is the Controversy Bigger Than You Think?

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On November 25th, Santa Ragione, the celebrated Italian developer known for acclaimed titles like MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, will
unveil their latest project “Horses”, which faced a ban from Steam, the largest digital marketplace for PC games. Shortly after, Epic Games Store also pulled the game just days before its intended release on December 2. Additionally, Horses was briefly removed from the Humble Store, though it was reinstated the following day.

This stirred-up controversy thrust the game into the spotlight on various digital platforms.
Teeth sells it on itch.io and GOG. Nevertheless, the pivotal question lingers—why was it banned? Horses tackles various highly sensitive subjects (the introduction notably warns of “physical violence, psychological abuse, graphic brutality, depictions of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, misogyny”), making it both disturbing and unsettling.

The storyline is straightforward but soon takes a dark turn. You step into the shoes of Anselmo, a 20-year-old Italian man who is sent to spend his summer on a farm for personal development. It rapidly becomes clear (so much so that I let out a startled “ha!”) that this is no ordinary farm. The “horses” present there are not real horses but naked humans with horse heads seemingly affixed to them.

Your task is to tend to the garden, the “horses,” and the “dog” (a human with a dog’s head). Throughout Horses’ three-hour duration, Anselmo engages in tedious and painfully slow daily chores, such as chopping wood and gathering vegetables. However, these mundane activities are peppered with disturbing tasks. On the first day, you stumble upon the corpse of a “horse” hanging from a tree and must assist the farmer in burying it.

While undeniably unsettling, Horses provides little in terms of horror nuance, and when it does, the severity is lessened by basic, crude graphics (when a farmer lashes a human horse and subsequently applies hydrogen peroxide to its back, the resulting marks on its skin appear blurred and unrealistic).

The genitals and udders of the “horses” are obscured. Slaves are prohibited from fornicating, yet we observe they still partake in such acts (depicted in a simplistic and animalistic manner). You are compelled to “tame” them by returning them to their pen, but your interactions with them are limited to button presses, leaving what you’ve done to them ambiguous.

Valve, the owner of Steam,
informed PC Gamer that Horses underwent content review in 2023. “After our team played the build and reviewed the content, we provided feedback to the developer regarding why the game cannot be published on Steam in accordance with our onboarding rules and guidelines,” reads their statement. “After some time, the developer requested we reassess the review, leading our internal content review team to discuss it thoroughly and communicate our final decision to the developer not to publish the game on Steam.”

According to IGN, the Epic Games Store told Santa Ragione, “Upon investigation, we found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically in our ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies, and as a result, the game cannot be published on the Epic Games Store.” Santa Ragione asserts that “the specifics of the contested content have not been clarified.”

The gameplay in Horses is grotesque but not without purpose. The horror is psychological, rooted in the unsettling sensation of performing mundane tasks in a hellish environment without understanding the reasons behind such bizarre occurrences. There’s minimal sound beyond the constant whir of a film camera (the game presents itself akin to a nearly silent Italian arthouse film), with sporadic cuts to ultra-close shots of mouths talking and chewing, disconcerting character models, and real-world visuals of water being poured into glasses or slop filling a dog’s bowl.

While there’s no explicit gore or overt violence, the discomfort, annoyance, and unease pervade throughout, exposing primal human fears without severely disturbing your lunch. Though this serves as an intriguing reflection on violence and power dynamics, it does not embody a shocking or excessive experience. The discussions it has sparked about video games as an art form and the censorship of art ultimately seem more profound than the game’s actual content.