Horror game Horses has been banned from sale – but is it as controversial as you think? | games

HeyOn November 25, award-winning Italian developer Santa Ragione, responsible for popular games like MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, revealed that its latest project, Horses, had been banned from Steam – the largest digital store for PC games. A week later, another popular storefront, the Epic Games Store, pulled Horses, just before its December 2 launch date. The game was also briefly removed from the Humble Store, but was reinstated a day later.

This controversy helped the game reach the top of digital stores We are Sold by itch.io and GOG. But the question remains: why was it banned? Certainly, “Horses” delves into some deeply controversial topics (the content warning at the beginning details “physical violence, psychological abuse, gory images, depictions of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny”) that is disturbing and unnerving.

The plot is fairly simple, although it turns dark quickly. You play as Anselmo, a 20-year-old Italian man who is sent to spend the summer working on a farm to build his character. It’s revealed almost immediately (so quickly in fact, that I had a surprised “ha!”) that the farm Anselmo has been sent to is no ordinary farm. The “horses” there are not actually horses, but naked humans wearing horse heads that appear to be permanently attached.

Your job is to take care of the garden, the “horses” and the “dog” (a human wearing a dog’s head). Anselmo performs menial and frustratingly slow daily tasks during the horses’ three-hour run, such as chopping wood and picking vegetables. But these monotonous tasks are interspersed with terrible and unsettling jobs. On the first day, you find a horse’s body hanging from a tree and you have to help the farmer bury it.

It’s disturbing, yes, but “Horses” doesn’t show most of these atrocities, and when it does, the crude, simplistic graphics dull its edges (when you come across a farmer whipping a human “horse” and having to throw hydrogen peroxide down its back, the marks criss-crossing its skin are blurry and unreal).

The genitals and breasts of the “horses” are indistinct. Enslaved people are forbidden from fornicating, but you’ll find that they do it anyway (a simplistic and animalistic depiction of sex), and although you are forced to “tame” them by putting them back in their pen, it’s just a push of a button to interact, with no indication of what you’ve actually done to them.

Valve, the company that owns Steam, told PC Gamer that the Horses content will be reviewed again in 2023. “After our team built and reviewed the content, we provided feedback to the developer on why we were unable to ship the game on Steam, in accordance with our rules and guidelines,” the statement read. “Shortly after the developer asked us to reconsider the review, our internal content review team discussed this extensively and informed the developer of our final decision that we would not ship the game on Steam.”

According to IGN, Epic Games Store told developer Santa Ragione: “We are unable to distribute horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store content guidelines, specifically the ‘inappropriate content’ and ‘hateful or offensive content’ policies.” Santa Ragione claims that “no details were provided about the content in question.”

The way the horses are played is horrible and it’s not free. The horror is psychological and lies in the inconsistency of performing menial tasks in a veritable hellscape, without having any idea why any of this is happening. There’s hardly any sound except the constant hum of the movie camera (the game is presented like a mostly silent Italian art film), extreme close-ups of mouths moving while speaking or chewing, disturbing character models, and the occasional cut to a real shot of water flowing into a cup or dirt filling a dog’s bowl.

There is no blood or obvious violence. You’re uncomfortable, frustrated, and stressed all the time, and the horrors of humanity are on full display, but nothing ever threatens to ruin your lunch. It’s an interesting meditation on violence and power dynamics, but it’s by no means a shocking or radical game. The conversation that has sparked around it — about video games as art and the censorship of art — has proven to be more profound than the actual content of the game.