{"id":434214,"date":"2025-12-08T22:30:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T22:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/434214\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T22:30:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T22:30:34","slug":"a-fine-game-that-shouldve-came-and-went","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/434214\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fine Game That Should\u2019ve Came And Went"},"content":{"rendered":"

When all is said and done at the end of Horses\u2019 two-hour runtime, Santa Ragione\u2019s 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<\/a>, and the reasons for that ban are odd, considering the specific content the storefronts mention doesn\u2019t seem to actually exist in the game. Santa Ragione says Valve refused to list Horses on its storefront due to scenes that \u201cdepict sexual conduct involving a minor,\u201d but after playing through the game, I\u2019m not sure what this is referring to. Horses isn\u2019t for the faint of heart, but it\u2019s also not\u2026that.<\/p>\n

\"Spoiler<\/p>\n

Horses is grotesque, unsubtle in its imagery, and underneath all the grit, grime, and gore, it is saying something. It\u2019s 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\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. I haven\u2019t even talked about the minutiae of how Horses gets there, but that\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That sounds simple enough, until he meets the horses he\u2019ll 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\u2019s stunted sexual growth and sex-negative upbringing have caused him to develop a psychosexual need to control others\u2019 sexual behavior, while finding ways around the mental and physical shackles he\u2019s put on himself.<\/p>\n

\"Horses\u00a9 Santa Ragione <\/p>\n

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\u2019s not allowed to have. This man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

A lot is being said about Horses\u2019 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\u2019s self-imposed religious chains and its animalistic nature to their horrifying extreme, I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s wider aesthetic choices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Horses isn\u2019t a good game, and its technical presentation is particularly agonizing. It literally made me sick with its stuttering, choppy jank; it\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019s not just in the subject matter.<\/p>\n

\"Horses <\/p>\n