by Matt Q 🎮
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Horses is a provocative new game from Italian game production studio Santa Ragione, in partnership with Andrea Lucco Borlera - a film graduate student at Roma Tre University, examining themes of dehumanization through authoritarian control and puritanical repression.
While leading digital storefronts Steam and Epic banned it from sale, through word-of-mouth and listing on independent storefronts like Itch.io, Horses managed to breakthrough the attempts to silence it, and has sold more than 18,000 copies since release.
Seemingly unintentionally, these attempts to silence Horses' message only ended up reinforcing and amplifying it.
But is Horses controversial enough to warrant banning it in the first place?
Presented in stark black and white, Horses’ color palette, 4:3 screen ratio and limited audio (often presented with the droning sound of a film projector in the background), gives strong silent-film vibes.
As the player, you embody Anselmo, a young man sent to a ranch in the Italian countryside for a few weeks over the summer to “build character.” The time period isn’t specified, but it feels “old”, like it’s based in the past. Things seem innocent enough in the beginning, as you are told you will be working on a farm helping the farmer with daily tasks, but things take a dark turn almost immediately after you arrive.
You soon discover that the farmer's prized "horses" aren't really horses at all, they are human beings with horse masks strapped to their heads and otherwise entirely naked (with blurred out pixels obscuring their genitals). There are perhaps 8 to 10 of them, all crowded together in a small gated corral.
The way the farmer talks about them, you wouldn't know that they weren't regular everyday horses, so clearly there is something seriously wrong with the entire situation.
There is a "dog" on the farm as well (named Fido), but as you may guess, it's also a naked human with a dog mask forcefully strapped onto its head.
On a regular day you help with common chores around the farm like feeding Fido, gathering or watering vegetables, and taking hay to feed the "horses". You are also told to inform the farmer if you notice any of the horses fornicating, and fornicate they do.
It actually becomes quite common that whenever you pass by the horses' pen, there is at least one pair of them going at it, although whether the sex is consensual or not is unclear. There isn't enough refinement to the animation to imply whether the act is forced or mutually desired. Whether this is a conscious design choice or a limitation of the developer's skill is seemingly unclear to the player.
There are also a few sequences where the player ends up riding one of the horses, and it's about as disturbing as you might imagine it to be.
Another disturbing event involves the possible SA(unclear whether it's consensual or not, but seems like it's probably not) of one of the horses by Fido while the farmer watches. (The scene is even more disturbing than just that, but I think you get the general idea.)
Then there is a sequence where you have to help the farmer castrate one of the male horses for fornicating with the female horses, and after the farmer cuts their penis off, you have to staple the wound shut. This is more horrific sounding than the actual in-game event is, since lots of things happen off camera, and the hole is very blurry and pixelated, but still... its quite disturbing.
These are not the only disturbing scenes in the game, but these were some of the most shocking from my perspective, and sure these are pretty terrible, but they aren't done in a way that glorifies it. It's horrible, you feel horrible after viewing it, and that's the entire point.
But despite all that, is Horses really THAT controversial that it deserved to be banned from sale on Steam?
I could see a storefront like Nintendo's not allowing it, given their (somewhat) family-friendly image (although there are a lot of questionable games on the Nintendo online store these days), but Steam has A LOT of very sexual and disturbing games that it allows on its platform. Furthermore, the initial ban decision occurred prior to the more recent decision around some sexual games being removed from Steam due to pressures from payment processing companies, and while some adult and sexual content was removed, there are still plenty of games that could be considered more objectionable and "obscene" than Horses, like...
Sex with Hilter - an Adults-only game that is exactly what you think it is. (I don't recommend looking it up on Steam unless you are prepared for a VERY NSFW trailer and screenshots.)
Ironically, the act of banning Horses seems to have just drawn more attention to it, and probably helped it sell more copies than it would have otherwise.
While Steam is a very large and important store front, there are a lot of games that go unnoticed and never find commercial success on it, no matter how shocking they may be. If Horses had been allowed to release as originally intended, I doubt it would have garnered the attention it did, or sold as many copies as it did, due to the critical attention garnered by the Steam ban.
Personally, while I like the silent-film-esque aesthetics and brief FMV action clips, I found Horses to be only mildly disturbing and somewhat interesting.
While I applaud the idea of making video games that are more than just pure entertainment, and start to enter the realm of critical artwork, I don't think Horses has a sharp enough point to really leave a lasting mark.
Sure, its themes of puritanical oppression and authoritarianism are somewhat interesting, and the shock of seeing enslaved humans as "horses" is interesting at first, but the general simplistic gameplay and meaningless decision paths take away from the impact it could have had.
To be fair though, I don't believe Horses was meant to be a well honed, expertly crafted masterpiece. The game retails for only $4.99, and it seems to deliver exactly the experience it was going for: somewhat provocative, short and disturbing. It was the first game from Borlera, and even the game studio itself is a relatively small indie operation that has only shipped a handful of titles.
Even though I don't believe the Steam ban was justified, I believe it inadvertently helped Horses enter a level of critical dialogue and awareness that probably wouldn't have happened without it.
After all, I chose this game for D1SC0URS' inaugural article and if it hadn't been banned on Steam and created the surrounding controversy, I probably wouldn't even know it existed.
If you want to see a bit of beginning gameplay from Horses, you can watch the YouTube clip below. It doesn't contain any of the more controversial scenes I mentioned, but it gives you a sense of the overall vibe and disturbing nature of the game.
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