Horses Review: A Great Game That Overstayed Its Welcome
▼ Summary
– The horror game *Horses* was banned from major PC storefronts for allegedly depicting sexual conduct involving a minor, but the reviewer found no such content in the actual game.
– The game uses grotesque and unsubtle imagery to critique the psychological damage of a forced, puritanical lifestyle, centering on a farmer who projects his sexual repression onto others.
– Its core disturbing premise involves humans, stripped naked and wearing horse masks, being kept on a farm, which serves as a metaphor for the farmer’s psychosexual need for control.
– While the game effectively conveys its themes, it is technically flawed with an ugly, jittery presentation that the reviewer found physically nauseating at times.
– The reviewer concludes the game is unremarkable and not particularly gratuitous, suggesting the bans were an overreaction and exposed the storefronts’ failure to properly vet the content.
After a two-hour playthrough, Santa Ragione’s horror game Horses leaves a distinctly middling impression, its notoriety arguably overshadowing its actual content. The title found itself at the center of a firestorm after being banned from major PC storefronts like Steam and Epic Games, with cited reasons that feel curiously disconnected from the game itself. Valve reportedly refused to list it due to alleged scenes of sexual conduct involving a minor, a claim that seems baffling after experiencing the game. While Horses is certainly grotesque and unsettling, it never crosses into the territory described by the platforms. This controversy, more than the game’s own merits, has fueled the discussion around it.
The narrative follows a young man named Anselmo, sent to work on a remote farm. The premise quickly spirals into the bizarre and horrific. The titular horses are, in fact, humans stripped naked and forced to wear equine masks, compelled to act like livestock. This disturbing setup serves as the vehicle for the game’s core exploration: the psychological damage wrought by a repressive, sex-negative upbringing. The farmer, a product of a puritanical doctrine, has externalized his own stunted psychosexual development, creating a twisted system where he enforces his own self-denial upon captives. The game’s crude, PS2-era aesthetic and unflinching imagery effectively, if bluntly, communicate its themes of control and distorted sexuality.
Technically, the experience is a struggle. The presentation is jittery and choppy to the point of inducing motion sickness, with visuals that feel amateurish. Yet, this pervasive ugliness could be interpreted as a deliberate artistic choice, mirroring the bleakness of the story. Every environment, the cramped, utilitarian farm, the grimy tools, the blood-stained pens, is designed to feel devoid of warmth or compassion. The sound design of buzzing flies and the grim visual palette combine to create a potent sense of emotional desolation.
A particularly contentious scene involves the farmer coercing one “horse” to assault another for his voyeuristic gratification. This moment, like much of the game’s violence, is rooted in sexual horror. While it’s easy to dismiss such elements as mere shock tactics, they are logically consistent within the game’s warped internal logic, stemming directly from the farmer’s pathology. However, understanding the intent does not necessarily translate to appreciating its execution. The game provokes comprehension more than genuine emotional or intellectual resonance.
Ultimately, Horses is a work that knows what it wants to say and uses a concise, albeit extreme, metaphor to say it. Its imagery is striking but rarely feels groundbreaking or profoundly memorable. The greater surprise lies in the severity of the storefront bans for a game whose transgressive content feels in line with many contemporary horror films. If anything, the controversy has revealed more about the opaque and inconsistent content policies of digital platforms than about the game itself. While not a masterpiece, Horses is a coherent, if flawed, artistic statement that deserved a chance to be judged on its own terms, rather than by the headlines it generated.
(Source: Kotaku)
