To live in this world is to endure varying degrees of degradation. First, you spend your childhood getting scolded by adults who bombard you with confusing rules. You’re labeled a sinner in your church. You work a job for bosses who don’t treat you like livestock. Your life is policed by politicians who use their power to degrade your identity and attempt to legislate it out of existence. The annoyances of youth only snowball as you get older, as you’re demeaned on an increasingly macro scale. Survival is a matter of overcoming a gauntlet of humiliation and taking control of your life back from those who seek to wrench it from you.
In Horses, a controversial new game by Santa Ragione that’s been banned from several PC gaming storefronts, that struggle mutates into surreal horror. Platforms, including Steam and Epic Games Store have only offered vague rationality for why exactly Horses was banned, and apparently have not responded to developer Santa Ragione’s appeals, leading many observers to wonder just how offensive the game really is. (Humble Games also briefly pulled the game from its store on Dec. 3, but relisted it hours later after reevaluating its content.) After playing through it, yes, Horses certainly goes places — and presents some uncomfortable imagery — but nothing so scandalous that feels worthy of a total ban.
In the three-hour story, a quiet farm in the Italian countryside becomes a prison for “horses” that are desperate to find freedom from a life of constant abuse at the hands of a controlling farmhand. While it’s too thematically broad to say anything that lives up to its loaded imagery, Horses turns the mundane horrors of day-to-day living into a meaningfully uncomfortable video game meant to rattle your fight or flight instinct.
Horses centers around Anselmo, a 20-year-old who lands a temporary gig helping out on a small farm for two weeks. He’s to live in isolation with the farm’s owner and his dog during that time, running on a strict schedule. Every day, he will wake up in his claustrophobic bedroom, eat a breakfast laid out for him, feed the dog, and complete a list of chores left for him. It’s a tight routine that players have no power to deviate from, as the entire game takes place in a small area that doesn’t give players room to explore. Anselmo is even forbidden from accessing one part of the farm, a cabin that’s used for unknown purposes, entirely. The only agency players have is that they can occasionally respond to their boss by choosing between some emojis that determine the tone of his response.
Even then, Anselmo is robbed of his voice here — quite literally. Horses is structured like a silent film, presented with striking black-and-white visuals and dialogue that’s only shown in old-timey title cards. We only get some occasional sound throughout the entire game, with some music stings here and there or sound effect splashes that sound like they’re coming from a live performer dubbing the picture somewhere off to the side. It’s a bold choice that serves multiple purposes. For one, it’s a bit maddening. You slowly develop cabin fever as the artistic limitations leave you with little to escape into. The focus is always on the mundane work, day in and out.
Though the routine is stringent, the daily tasks are easy enough to complete even with some unclear direction. Pick some vegetables, chop a few logs, feed the horses some hay. It would all be your average summer job if it weren’t for the horrifying twist of it all: The horses aren’t horses at all. A small fenced area is filled with what appear to be nude humans with horse heads. They stand in their pen silently, spending all day blankly staring off into space like caged sheep as they wait to be fed, hosed off, and occasionally beaten for disobeying the farmer’s rules. (Chief among them: no fornication.)
That’s where the horror sets in. The daily tasks become darker each day. Anselmo is forced to snitch on anyone who is caught fucking, to assist in their mutilation, to stand by as window shopping slavers take a ride onn their shoulders. Two weeks turns into an eternity of torment, as you have no choice but to enforce the farmer’s rules without ever being clued into what the hell is going on. There are shades of Ari Aster’s Midsommar to be found, as you’re asked to assimilate to grotesque behavior presented as a normal way of life.
There are filmic touchpoints aplenty in Horses. The black-and-white aesthetic paired with its focus on mundane labor calls Italian neorealist films from the likes of Vittorio De Sica to mind. Films like Umberto D depict everyday life in Italy with painstaking mundanity, focusing on characters who are simply struggling to get by in an at times unforgiving world. Strip away the horse mutilation and flashes of surrealist horror delivered through mock double exposures, and you’re left with an otherwise grounded story about a young laborer trying to make ends meet under the rule of an abusive boss. (Horses acts as a surprisingly perfect compliment to this year’s Mafia: The Old Country, which digs into the long relationship between Italy and its history of labor issues.)
The more fitting film comparison, though, is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. A controversial film that faced widespread censorship when it released in 1975, Salò adapts the Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom into an art horse horror film that offers a searing critique of Italian fascism through stomach-churning imagery. A group of wealthy libertines kidnaps a group of teenagers and proceeds to degrade them in ritualistic fashion over the course of months. They are raped, beaten, forced to eat feces. It’s disgusting, but not without a point to the shock. It’s meant to confront viewers with the horrors of fascism turned up to their extreme. We’re to feel that it’s a political movement that is built on debasing everyday people. (Pasolini himself would be mutilated and murdered in 1975, a mysterious killing that some suspect to be tied to his strong political beliefs.)
Horses attempts to adapt Salò into a video game, though in much tamer fashion. The genitals are all blurred out and any brutality happens off-camera, facts that make its widespread ban across platforms like Steam all the more ridiculous. It’s a softer approach for what’s ultimately a much less radical game thematically. Rather than using shock to tackle fascism, Horses only broadly gestures at the various power struggles we experience in everyday life. It begins as a sharp labor satire, but eventually veers off into half-baked commentary about topics like religion that winds up feeling cartoonishly one-dimensional. A final revelation about Anselmo’s boss leaves the story feeling a touch juvenile, struggling to pay off the sickening imagery that proceeds it.
Horses’ ban from multiple storefronts helps make its underexplored point stronger.
Though the themes never circle to anything profound, Horses’ power still lies in its moments of discomfort. All you can do is squirm as you’re roped into atrocity after atrocity, forced to participate in a sick ritual led by a man who gets off on controlling others. He makes the rules and everyone in his orbit has to follow them — or else. Put a tool back in the shed after you use it. Eat another piece of meat even if you’ve indicated that you’re full. And absolutely no fornicating! At what point do rules become something that are only designed to give their creator a power trip?
In some twisted way, Horses’ ban from multiple storefronts helps make its underexplored point stronger. Who gets to decide what art is and isn’t acceptable? And how can any developer follow those guidelines if they can be changed retroactively? Santa Ragione finds itself at the center of a humiliation ritual now, as storefronts exert their power to ensure that the studio is punished for daring to make uncomfortable art. But you can’t hold back outsider art for long. History tells us that the fight will always continue on the fringes, with controversial art like Salò eventually securing their place in art history canon. Like the prisoners stuffed into its digital farm, Horses will run free one day. It will just need to survive a lot of degradation to get there.
Horses is out now on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC via itch.io. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
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