I Don’t Think We’d Be Talking Much About Horses If It Hadn’t Been Banned

When all is said and done at the end of Horses’ two-hour runtime, Santa Ragione’s horror game feels remarkably unremarkable. The game has been caught in a shit storm of controversy after it was banned from PC storefronts like Epic and Steam, and the reasons for that ban are odd, considering the specific content the storefronts mention doesn’t seem to actually exist in the game. Santa Ragione says Valve refused to list Horses on its storefront due to scenes that “depict sexual conduct involving a minor,” but after playing through the game, I’m not sure what this is referring to. Horses isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s also not…that.

Horses is grotesque, unsubtle in its imagery, and underneath all the grit, grime, and gore, it is saying something. It’s just not anything really revolutionary. Its gruesome imagery paints a fairly straightforward image of the psychological damage of a forced puritanical lifestyle on the self and society, and even through its crude, PS2-style aesthetic, it gets its point across well enough. I just wonder how much we would be talking about it had it not been for Valve and Epic’s actions.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even talked about the minutiae of how Horses gets there, but that’s because all those details are less interesting than that hypothetical to me. Horses stars a young man named Anselmo who is sent off by his parents to work on a rural, out-of-the-way farm in a small town. 

That sounds simple enough, until he meets the horses he’ll be taking care of, who are actually humans stripped naked and forced to wear horse masks while acting as if they are a herd of equine animals. You even ride on their shoulders a few times, much to your chagrin. But the disturbing imagery is gradually revealed to be a way for Horses to explore how the farmer’s stunted sexual growth and sex-negative upbringing have caused him to develop a psychosexual need to control others’ sexual behavior, while finding ways around the mental and physical shackles he’s put on himself.

© Santa Ragione

If nothing else, Horses gets this across pretty well, if unsubtly. The farmer comes from a backwater town in which sexual frustration is forced upon a civilization by a doctrine preaching that abstinence is close to godliness, and so his entire life has become fixated on something he wants but has been brainwashed into believing he’s not allowed to have. This man’s entire mental and sexual development has been shackled like a chastity belt, and so he has created an entire business and network supporting a farm in which he is able to force that same self-denial on any poor bastard found wandering near his land.

A lot is being said about Horses’ use of graphic sexual imagery as the reason for its being banned on the most popular PC storefronts, but even as it takes the cross between humanity’s self-imposed religious chains and its animalistic nature to their horrifying extreme, I didn’t find it particularly gratuitous. It was exaggerated, meant to be evocative, and in some scenes, comically amplified, but that felt in line with the game’s wider aesthetic choices. 

Horses isn’t a good game, and its technical presentation is particularly agonizing. It literally made me sick with its stuttering, choppy jank; it’s pretty ugly, and nearly everything about it looks and feels like the work of a team still getting its feet wet in Unity. Still, I’m willing to buy that the ugliness could be a deliberate aesthetic, as the ugly nature of its story is perhaps best captured in a crude, gross-out paint job. When people talk in Horses, they get unsettling close-ups as their lips flap, broken up by silent-film-style caption cards. Santa Ragione wants this game to feel gross, and it’s not just in the subject matter.

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  "The game your mom was worried about."

• Developer:

  Santa Ragione Game Studio

• Type of game:

  Horror game in which you tend to a farm while shit gets crazy.

• Liked:

  It communicates what it's trying to get across pretty well.

• Disliked:

  Actually made me motion sick it was so jittery, ugly but in an artistic way, probably.

• Platforms:

  PC

• Release date:

  December 2

• Played:

  ~2 hours

Every shot of Horses’ run-down farm is framed to make it look like a place lacking any real heart, soul, or love. It is a small space built solely for utility, and since it’s not a farm designed for taking care of animals, everything about it is small, cramped, hastily built, and only stores the titular horses and tools with no consideration for comfort or care. The fact that the game is just ugly to look at only helps Santa Ragione convey that feeling of emotional desolation. I can practically smell the god-awful shit-and-blood-stained farm through my computer as the sound of flies buzzing echoes through my headphones.

My feelings on Horses largely boil down to “yeah, that was probably what they were going for, and it’s delivered in a clear, concise, and effectively crude manner.” I get what Horses is saying at any given moment, but I don’t find any of it particularly powerful. It’s striking, but is it that memorable? Is anything in this game that much more objectionable than your average Ari Aster film?

© Santa Ragione

There is one moment that has received a fair bit of criticism: a scene in which the farmer forces one horse to sexually assault another so he can watch, pounding on his chastity belt as it happens. This is certainly one of the more horrific moments in Horses, and most of the game’s worst moments are rooted in sexual violence of some kind. Much like everything else in Horses, I don’t feel like I have a grand takeaway from this moment’s inclusion beyond it communicates exactly what it’s trying to. I do disagree with the criticism that Horses’ use of sexual violence is just another point on a shock value scoreboard, because when the game portrays these disgusting acts of violence, I see how they flow back into its themes of sexual distortion and the psychological effects the farmer’s experiences have had on him. But a tall, dividing fence stands between comprehension and appreciation for its meditations on the matter.

Horses is fine. It’s not particularly trailblazing, but it knows what it’s trying to convey, and it uses a pretty concise visual metaphor to get it across. It is gross to look at, but I only really mind that when its jittery framerate makes me queasy. I don’t believe it is as distasteful as Epic or Steam does, and I still am surprised that something that feels mostly tame and along the lines of an A24 horror film has caused such controversy. If Horses didn’t expose anything we didn’t already know about the dangers of a sheltered, puritanical lifestyle, it at least unmasked Steam and Epic as cowardly companies that can’t be bothered to actually vet the work they’re barring from entry. I wish we could’ve had the conversation those bans sparked about a better game, but Horses, at the very least, is fine enough to have deserved better than being locked out in the rain.